Author Archives: Nelis van den Berg

Episode 6

podcast with shownotes
Leading in Conversation
Leading in Conversation
Leading in Conversation – Episode 6
Loading
/

Transcript

Kate: Hello and welcome to another episode of Leading in Conversation! Today we thought we’d do something a little bit different and answer some questions. As we’ve been doing quite a lot of talking and presenting recently in our organisation about conversational leadership at a couple of different events and as more people have been listening to our podcast, we’re collecting quite a few excellent questions and we thought we’d just take some time to tackle them today. 

Nelis: I wish we had the people themselves asking it, and that we truly had a conversation and not just the sterile conversation between the two of us, but it’ll have to do! 

Kate: Absolutely. That would be way more fun wouldn’t it? We really enjoy it when people join us. But today, it’s just us. Bit boring, hey? Okay, so Nelis, are you ready for the first question? 

Nelis: Let’s try it!

Kate: Is conversational leadership just another tool in a leaders toolbox or is it more than that? 

Nelis: It’s definitely more than that. It is a tool. It’s actually a very useful tool, but it goes way beyond that. It is really about understanding how organisations work: this idea that an organisation is a network of conversations and how change actually happens. It is embracing the idea that the conversation triggers the change, and the conversation in many ways is the change. It really contrasts the organisation as a machine that you need to tinker with and that is how traditionally organisations have been seen. And so, if you really embrace this idea of organisations as networks of people who relate to each other, that’s where decisions are being made in context, and conversational leadership is about joining that but triggering those new ideas, etc. 

Kate: Yes. I like to pair conversational leadership with co-creational. Conversational and co-creational leadership because I think therein is the difference. It’s not just about talking, it’s not about pulling out a participatory methods tool. It’s not just saying, “Well, now we’re going to be conversational about this and talk more”. It’s actually about bringing more people into discussion, into a space where you need some direction, to co-create a solution together. And it’s operating with that mindset all the time.

Nelis: Which is exactly quite a challenge because then broadening the network of decision-makers and assuming that decisions are going to be made at every level of the organisation, that’s what conversational leadership is about. But that’s also something that takes time, and it’s hard to maintain. That’s why we keep talking about it. 

Kate: And as we always say, we’re not experts, we’re still figuring this out as we go. Definitely. Okay, next question. 

Nelis. So Kate, after talking about what it really is, the question then comes up, and somebody asked us that, what is actually new about this? What is new about conversational leadership compared to other approaches? 

Kate: That’s a good question. I think for me, one of the biggest things is that the focus in conversational leadership is not on leaders, ironically. It’s on the wisdom of all. Conversational leadership fits into that paradigm of post-heroic leadership. It’s not just about a leader isolated, making the decision even with a small group of other leaders at the top, but it’s… the word is heterarchical, not hierarchical. You want to get as many people as possible and leaders and consultants are part of the process, not standing outside it, acting on the organisation, you know, as you said as a machine.

Nelis: So let me add to that, and I’ve said this before, it’s kind of my hobby horse, but what I think is key to it is also that it really embraces the emergent nature of change. It really embraces this idea that organisations are always in movement and that setting a vision from the top doesn’t work because it’s always fluid. It embraces that fluidity and uses it actually as something really powerful, by having more people involved in the whole decision-making process, by freeing people up to make their own decisions and to look for novelty, and to leverage that. 

Kate: Yes, so instead of imposing a decision about where we are going in a process, you know, leaders imposing a decision:  “This is what we’re aiming for, everyone”, it’s like, “What’s the problem? Where do we want to go?”, getting people together, getting the diversity in the room, creating conditions for novelty to emerge in conversation. 

Nelis: Yes, and really, being okay with the idea that there is not one right answer or that the right answer for now, may not be the right answer in the future. Even a lot of facilitated processes have in the past been or continue to often focus on getting the right answer, getting the best answer. Well, conversational leadership assumes that there is no best answer. There are lots of answers and some work better than others and what works well now may not work well tomorrow. And it’s that constant going-with-the flow of working it out in community. 

Kate: In fact, just yesterday, I was meeting with my team leaders and we’re doing our FY23 planning and really trying to wrestle with, you know, what does this look like – emergent planning, doing this conversationally, in an emergent way, because you know, we made plans for the last couple of years and many of them didn’t happen because of Covid. So how therefore do we now plan for the next year not knowing what will happen, but being okay with that. I think we’re all becoming a little bit more comfortable with that emergent planning. We’ll start some things and see what happens, see what emerges. And I think that’s quite new. I think that still takes a lot of getting used to. 

Nelis: Yes, and that creates resistance as well. Although some of this and I think it’s good to point out. This is not the unique domain of conversational leadership. The idea that you quickly change, the fact that you bring in more people. All of these things are not in that sense unique. But I think  conversational leadership brings those elements together in a coherent way of thinking that combines things in new ways. 

Kate: So, another question we’ve had, Nelis, is: what do you think makes a particular method conversational or not conversational? I like this one.

Nelis: Yes, I like that too. It’s a difficult question because there are so many different tools out there that use conversation. It’s not black and white, let me put it that way. There are a lot of methods that use conversation and you could call those conversational, you wouldn’t be wrong, but I think what really is key for something to be truly conversational, is that it pools the wisdom from the whole group and doesn’t assume an answer ahead of time. That it doesn’t try to push the group into a certain direction, but that it’s truly coming in without a predefined answer. And too often I’ve seen facilitated processes that are trying to get a group to buy in. And what makes a method truly conversational, is when the answer is completely unknown going into it. You may have a suspicion of what might come out, but you just don’t know and you’re totally okay with that. And I think that is a key element in a method truly being conversational. 

Kate: Is there something also about the nature of the conversation? 

Nelis: I think there is. So, let’s explore that together. 

Kate: Yes, I mean, so with my team yesterday, I was leading a conversation about, a discussion about what are our big picture priorities going to be for our overall unit for the next three years. It’s something about the quality of conversation, something about keeping the conversation free-flowing, helping people to make associations. So as the facilitator, the leader in that situation, I was very much trying to hold back, to listen, to make connections but not impose anything, any sense making too prematurely. And actually as a leader it felt a little bit sort of random and chaotic to me but by the time we got to the end, everyone was like, “Wow that was a really significant conversation, that was so rich” and I was just like “Oh but I need some things, some words, to put in the plan!”. We’re not there yet. It was just a brainstorm. But there’s a piece there about the quality, the flow, the sense-making in a conversational process, compared to non-conversational. 

NElis: Yes, and I think that is really helpful but there’s another element in the nature of the conversation that it is focused on finding answers together. So it’s not just a random conversation between friends. A conversational leadership conversation has to be focused on moving the organisation of the group further into a decision, into a new product, into new developments, into new understandings. It’s not a random conversation.

Kate: There’s definitely an element of discernment in there. And actually, what we did at the end of yesterday’s meeting was said, “Okay, press pause on this. Let’s all go away, let’s reflect. Let’s see what else comes, make notes on this between now and our next meeting”. And then we’ll pick it up again and then try to do some synthesis or sense-making. But really being open to what is developing, what is emerging. And trying to pin that down at a certain point, but not too soon. Which actually leads us on to another question. You can try this one. How do decisions get made in a conversational leadership approach? 

Nelis: Yes, we often get asked this because there’s this fear that you get bogged down and no decisions get made or it gets way too slow. So how decisions get made is really important. And I think it is a key part of leadership to hold the group accountable for decision-making at some point.  You can do that in some kind of predetermined but flexible time frame, by you saying, “We’ve got to come to a decision at this point.” And you can say, “Okay, we’re not there yet. We need a little bit more time”. But it’s not endlessly flexible. So I think that is the role of leadership to either let the consensus emerge and basically say, “Okay, I think we’ve got a decision”. 

Kate: “Does that resonate with you?  Are you hearing what I’m saying?” Etc. So that the leader does kind of step in, or the facilitator steps in, and has a sensemaking role – to pull things out and say, “Well, this is what I’m hearing,  is this correct?” 

Nelis: Or even when it is still quite divergent and you need to come to a decision, to propose something and say “For now I propose that we go with this, hold this lightly, revisit it if it turns out to be wrong, but is everyone okay, moving ahead with this in the meantime?” And I think that is an important aspect where you don’t impose it but you give it as a best answer for now that we can arrive at. 

Kate: Yes, another thing that we came across when we were reading about dialogic processes was this idea of the conversation leading to what they call “probes”. Which is a kind of decision-making.  Say you gather together as a team and you’ve got a problem and you want to find different solutions. At the end of a conversation process, you might say, “Well, here’s a couple of things we’re going to try”. As a leader you give permission, you give budget, you open up gateways for people to then experiment with those probes. And that’s a form of decision-making. It’s an emergent way. “Let’s try this out and see a pilot project. Let’s keep going down this road a little bit and see if this leads somewhere”.

Nelis: And to me that has all to do with this embrace of emergence. We don’t know what the right answer is, but we’ve got to move forward with something and some things will work out, may work out for now, but not forever. And you constantly readjust. And so probes, tentative plans, tentative decisions are, I think, absolutely essential. It creates freedom for people to participate and to try things out, which I think we don’t do often enough

Kate: And it may not be the perfect decision. I think the critical thing is that it’s a good enough decision. This is something I came up against in my research, coming from Ralph Stacey and colleagues, this sense of “good enough”. You know, often, we’re in our strategic planning, we’re just trying to pin everything down and get everything just right. This really resonated with me because so much of the time we can’t know what the future is going to hold. And I think as leaders it’s hard to embrace that “not knowing” and sometimes we just need to settle for a good enough decision, not a perfect one. And then time and practice reveals whether that was the right decision or not, and you make adjustments. And that obviously takes humility to be willing to adjust and actually admit that wasn’t the right decision, but here’s what we’ve learned in the process.

Nelis: And again, this is not unique – it’s good to keep pointing that out – to conversational leadership. I’m right now reading a book by Carla Johnson about Innovation. One of her things is there is not this one thing that will be “The Innovation”. You should come with 30 different ideas in your pocket. There are hundreds of them out there that could work. It’s just finding them. And she has this method for finding them, which is very much also, one of the methods is crowdsourced. And so, just pointing out that there are overlaps with other ideas in current management literature. 

Kate: Things like this don’t come from nowhere, they develop because of the sea change in society or because of a change in our access to information or our ability to connect. We can do crowdsourcing now, we can do participatory things in a way that we couldn’t do previously because we didn’t have the internet, we didn’t have Zoom, etc. Or even getting everyone in the room, in the same room at the same time. Did  we answer the question then? “How do decisions get made in a conversational leadership approach?”. I think we did.And “Collectively” is probably a one-word answer. How do decisions get made? “Together!” 

Nelis: Collectively, tentatively. And holding it lightly. Yes.

Nelis: Another question that has come up is that we have used – in our organisation – participatory methods quite a lot already. So what does it actually add when you talk about conversational leadership? 

Kate: Yes, good question, actually. So, yes in SIL – because of the nature of our work with communities – we have already used participatory methods a lot. We have a lot of people who are very well trained in how to do this. And  is conversational leadership something new? In a sense, no. I think they share a philosophical basis in social constructionism, that together we create reality, we create understanding, we create meaning, as well as some of the principles that, you know, listening is very important. The quality of the conversation is very important. The power of language, narrative, stories, etc. I’d say that there are lots of participatory tools that you can use to facilitate conversations. And we’ve certainly used some of them. I think we’ve talked in the past about World Cafe, Focused Conversation, Appreciative Inquiry, others like that. And the Bushe and Marshak book that I have added onto our resources page, has a long list of different participatory methods that can be used. And you can Google that if that’s new to you

Nelis:  What I think is also new in the way we’ve approached this recently is to take the facilitator more out of the central role. A lot of participatory methods are very facilitation heavy and the facilitator has everything sorted out ahead of time. It’s like a hub-and-spoke. So the facilitator is the hub. Everything flows through that facilitator. Whereas, I believe that what we’re seeing in truly conversational leadership is the role of the facilitator is much less pronounced. We’ve called it the host. It’s the idea that leadership flows to different parts of the organisation, different people and it doesn’t have to be all neatly methodical and sorted out ahead of time. I think that that is a key part of conversational leadership that in traditional participatory methods is less in focus. 

Kate: And of course, we may be completely misrepresenting participatory methods here. So if you are a practitioner please write and let us know. 

Kate: Okay, here’s a bit of a fun one to end on then. Is conversational leadership just for extroverts and people who like talking? I love this! We are both extroverts, verbal processors, and we like talking. So we may be a little bit biased here. What do you think, Nelis? 

Nelis: I wonder if introverts wouldn’t actually be better at it? Because yes, extroverts love talking, but I think the key thing in conversational leadership is the listening part. And listening is so absolutely essential. I think a lot of introverts have this to contribute, that they listen well. They get all the different viewpoints, they don’t come in with their ideas already sorted out ready to roll. The pitfall for an extrovert is that you’re wanting to jump in and guide it and bring your wonderful idea out there. And actually that’s not what it’s about at all. So I’m not sure that it’s just for extroverts actually, because they [introverts] may be more qualified. 

Kate: Yes, I agree. I think it’s not about quantity of talking either – which we may be guilty of – but quality of conversation. It’s an important distinction there. So no, it’s not just for extroverts or some people who like conversation but it’s probably a little bit easier for us. 

Nelis: So again, love to hear comments and responses from people who are introverts and who have participated in those kinds of processes and share your thoughts.

Kate: A final question which we’re not actually going to answer now is one that does come up a lot. It comes up so much that we’re actually going to devote a whole podcast episode and invite some friends and colleagues to join us for this one. This is, how does conversational leadership work in different cultural settings? We’ll be setting up another podcast and look out for that one. It’s a critical question, as many of us work in multicultural environments with people from different cultures. How do we make it work across cultures when some people are more culturally inclined to speak up first and voice their own opinions and speak as individuals, and others will hold back, are thinking about how to honour and respect others in the room, they’re aware of things like age and seniority, hierarchy. And also for leaders in some cultures, where leaders are really thought to be weak if they don’t have the answer already on the tip of their tongues. How do you use conversational leadership in that kind of environment without looking weak? 

Nelis: Great, Kate, that is a wonderful cliffhanger for a future episode. This is like an episode in a series…

Kate: Tune in for the answers… 

Nelis: Exactly, but we’re hoping to do that in a way that we as two westerners are not going to provide the answers. We need to do this in dialogue with actually people from those cultures otherwise we’re falling into the trap of answering for others, and I don’t think we should do that.

We’re looking forward to seeing you next time on Leading in Conversation. It’s fun to be with you all! 

Episode 5

podcast with shownotes

Shownotes

Reinhold recommended three short articles to introduce people to conversational leadership:

Suchman, A. L. (2017) ‘Avoiding the most common and fatal pitfalls of organizational change’, on Relationship Centered Health Care website. 

Part 1: Change how you think about change!

Part 2: Attend to the losses that are part of every change

Part 3: Hold the tension of change

A longer article:

Suchman, A. (2011) ‘Organizations as Machines, Organizations as Conversations: Two Core Metaphors and Their Consequences’, in Medical Care  Vol 49, No 12 Suppl 1

And a book: Winters, M. F. (2020), Inclusive Conversations: Fostering Equity, Empathy and Belonging Across Differences.

Transcript

Nelis: I’m really pleased to introduce a guest into our podcast, Reinhold Titus. He has agreed to walk with us through his experience in his organisational context around conversational leadership and doing that cross-culturally. So, Reinhold, why don’t you introduce yourself a little bit? 

Reinhold: Thanks so much Nelis, and Kate, for having me. Looking forward to the next few minutes together. My name is Reinhold Titus. I am from Namibia. That’s my primary passport country. I grew up in a cross-cultural context and in Namibia mostly, a few of my childhood years in South Africa. My first career was in the medical field in radiology, and then left and joined an international NGO and have been involved in that for over 20 years now. Lived in six different countries. Actually my family and I are currently living in Germany. So, this is the sixth country that we’re living in. Been involved with NGO work in leadership and strategy and leadership development, but also lived in South Africa for just over 10 years and during that time ran an intercultural consultancy, so working with profit and nonprofit sector around the whole issue of cultural intelligence, diversity and inclusion, coaching expats who were relocating around the world. And so some of the multinational companies were bringing me in to coach them, just as they were navigating their own sense of identity, transitions and leading in a very different context and so forth. But yeah, currently living in Germany involved in an organisation where I am responsible for our strategy alignment. And then also looking at what we just term inclusion, but the whole diversity and inclusion within the organisation. 

Nelis: We’re looking forward to hearing from that incredibly rich background.

Kate: Yes, and I must add that Reinhold and I met in England during our Master studies. We both encountered conversational leadership there and were very interested in each other’s research topics so stayed in touch. And we recently invited Reinhold to speak at a leaders event on his research into the inclusion of majority world staff into Western-founded organisations. And for those of you who’ve listened to episode 4, you might have picked up that the group there was referring to the outsider who came and spoke, and that was Reinhold!

Reinhold: I actually still have to listen to that, Kate. 

Kate: Yes, you should listen to that episode. They’re very complimentary about your input into our time together. But Reinhold’s also interested in conversational approaches to change in the intersection of that with inclusion and belonging. So I’m really looking forward to what he has to say today. 

Nelis: Yes, I am too. Let’s start off. Kate just said you’re interested in conversational leadership as well. So, what interests you there? 

Reinhold: I think there were three things for me that triggered my interest around conversational leadership. One was, just as I looked at the world, and then of course for me personally, faith is an integral aspect of my life. But even as I look at it from a faith perspective, I realised that conversations have so much potential in terms of helping us cross divides, overcome differences, political, whatever it might be. If we can get to healthy places of conversations, honest, vulnerable conversations, it has a potential for bringing so much healing and change and all of that. So that was certainly an aspect that interested me. But also from a cultural perspective. I’m an African and many of our cultures are oral cultures. Generally, knowledge is transferred, sense is made, in conversation rather than reading a book and sitting there by myself and reflecting, then writing another chapter about what I think. It’s in the conversation that we sense what’s happening, that we connect relationally with one another, at a heart, human fundamental needs level. And then, just what the future holds and sensing that together. So, in fact, in my father’s language, which is Xhosa, and Zulu, we have a word that we call, that is, indaba. And indaba is really a time and space where people come together to talk together as a community, or even as representatives of a community to solve issues or find ways forward and strengthen community. It just resonated with me from where I come from, culturally in the world.

Kate: That’s very much the case in other parts of the world as well, not just Africa. I experienced that in Papua New Guinea: everything is done through conversation, through storying, as they call it. “Let’s sit down and stori”. And for me coming from the West, when we were sitting by the fire and someone first said “Stori!”, I was like, do I have to tell a story, you know, thinking of fictitious… No, it’s just that conversational “let’s just sit here and talk things out”. I love that about the culture there.

Nelis: Yeah, so that’s interesting because often I hear that conversational leadership is difficult in a non-western context because it assumes a sort of egalitarian way of approaching things. You’re saying the opposite. You’re saying, actually, oral cultures are incredibly well suited for conversational leadership. 

Reinhold: Well, now you’re talking about conversations and you’re bringing leadership into it. And those are two that we then bring together in terms of conversations and leadership. And of course, leadership  is culturally constructed. What leadership looks like in context, you know, again, this is where I can critique some of our literature a little bit. But often, when we read books about leadership, there’s a prescribed way about how leadership works and what leadership looks like and all of that. But no, it comes out of a particular cultural paradigm that defines leadership and then we try and uncritically export it around the world and say this is the way you should lead and so on. And there are equally legitimate, perhaps different, but equally legitimate ways of leading in different contexts. And so when you put that together, yes, there’s often a bit more hierarchical ways of leadership in some of the majority world cultures, but you also have leaders who perhaps in a different way, will engage in conversation. And of course, for many of us from that part of the world Nelson Mandela would be an amazing example of an African leader who employed conversational styles of leadership and yet, understood the hierarchical issues. There is, of course, the cultural element to that and hierarchy that needs to be navigated, but there are many leaders who are employing this and just finding the culturally appropriate ways of doing it. So again, even with conversational leadership that we don’t try and uncritically export that to the rest of the world and say, this is the way it should be done. It’s to recognize what is in the culture, leverage that which is already in the culture that can actually help you to get there, but also be aware of those elements that may not be the same as where people come from the West, how they would do things. So for me, in a sense, is it again you cannot do this well in a global multicultural context without some level of cultural intelligence or savvy, to be able to do this well, in different contexts, or with diverse groups. 

Nelis: Yeah, and I hope that this podcast will be sort of an encouragement for that research, for that exploration and actually the practice of leadership cross-culturally and conversational leadership bringing that together would be fascinating and I’m hoping for more of that. 

…

Nelis: You said there are three things that sort of interested you. I’ve heard two, if I’m not mistaken. 

Reinhold: Yeah. So the third one for me would be the opportunity that it presents to us to get input from the outside of the hierarchical spaces, where if you just had a certain group of people: just what it unleashes, you know, in terms of creativity, innovation, the engagement it creates when people are involved in that process. So it’s just what it unleashes is something that triggered me because I’ve seen it whenever we employ in culturally relevant ways, but it energises people. And so for me, that was the third one, that inspires me towards exploring this, that wisdom exists throughout organisations. Insights, perspectives, different ways of doing things, understanding of contexts, exist in places in our organisations that leadership have no idea of and no access to. And so how do we tap into that? I can give you examples… Just speaking to my teenage goddaughter, many years ago and asking her questions and she gave me an answer that I would never have thought about as an adult and it sort of guided my parenting just getting wisdom from an 11 year old at the time. So you know, just wisdom that exists within the organisation that you often do not tap into. 

Kate: Absolutely–and we’ve discussed that in previous episodes–that actually when we stick to a small group of leaders with just one perspective or one set of experiences we limit ourselves and we limit the potential for change as well. And you need diversity in order to be able to discern the way forward often as a leader because you don’t have the perspective that others have. So yeah, that resonated with me as well that the wisdom of all is really needed. 

Nelis: Just yesterday I was in a conversation where I was confronted again with the fact that we as leaders tend to look at just one layer of the organisation: the one hundred people that we always go to. And it is quite a challenge to try to really reach well beyond that. You’re right, conversational leadership opens those kinds of avenues if we employ it well. 

…

Kate: Reinhold, would you share a little bit about, what are your experiences using conversational leadership in your organisational context, in your NGO? 

Reinhold: Yeah, and again, context is important and I’m glad to be using that word because it would look differently in different contexts. I wouldn’t say we are there not by any means at all. And in fact, what is “there”? It always depends. I’ve studied strategic management before and I’ve been involved in strategic management. And when I took on this particular role in the organisation, there was a level of complexity there that was just beyond anything that I’d experienced before. We have people from within the wider organisation, more than 100 different countries. In one of the units that we run, over 60 different countries. So that level of diversity and that’s just nationalities, you’re not even talking about the languages, the ethnicities, and the life experiences that everybody brings with them. So we were dealing with a very diverse staff, we were engaging with people in national and regional contexts who are very, very different from each other. And so our organisational strategy needs to be set up in such a way that we can have that flexibility and not just, “This is the Five-Year Plan and this is how we’re going to work”. And then, of course, the awareness of the fast and continuous changes in the world. And of course Covid over the last two years ago, that that has exponentially enhanced that sense of the VUCA world that we often talk about that we live in. So I just realised, even my skill set was not suited for what I needed to do. And so what do I do? Do I just go back to the toolbox I have and use the tools I have even though the job requires different tools, because that’s what I know. And quite, frankly that’s what people expect. That’s what makes people feel comfortable as well, the traditional change management approaches. When I got introduced to this and I think what was helpful is, it takes a lot of self worth for a leader because it takes you into a lot of uncertainty, insecurity, questioning, opening yourself up for questioning, the traditional change management leaders come and stand up, advisors would come in stand in front of you and say, “Okay. This is how we’re going to do things”. Now, this would say “We don’t know, you know, I don’t know. We need to sense this together”. “Well, what are we paying you for if you come and tell us you don’t know?”. So I think it took a lot of self-worth for me to be comfortable with what was required of me, comfortable with “I don’t know” and it’s okay if people know, I don’t know. That sense of humility and embrace of my own insecurities and all of that. So I think that that was one of the biggest things that I needed to work through, is to be comfortable with this. 

I remember one of our earlier conversations. I wanted to get a much wider part of engagement, much wider groups and people involved. But as I was sensing the organisation, I realised perhaps I was trying to push too much too soon. If I could just get a sector or group of the organisation together, it would be more than what we’ve ever done before. And then even thinking about that group that we get together. Can we intentionally work diversity into that instead of, as you said, we go to the hundred people that we always go to. It’s “No, who are the other voices out there that would not automatically end up on that list of 100 people?” And how do we get them into the conversation?

…

Nelis: You say that you realised you needed to start with a subsection of the organisation because biting off everything at the same time was too much. Can you say a bit more on that, is that like an experiment? Or is that something that you see as gradually expanding outward? How does that work from your perspective? 

Reinhold: I think it comes back to leadership again. What I realised that will provide the greatest leverage is not for me to try and push that we do this throughout the organisation, but to take leaders on a journey to help them see the value of it because they lead in spaces that I will never get to, to help them see the value to help give them some kind of language and tools on how to do that. And some leaders have caught on to this more so than others. Particularly one of our leaders I just found incredibly encouraging to see, as he started working with me and there was even a period during the Covid time in lockdown, that I couldn’t travel to get to a significant group of our people. And he travelled, and we talked about it beforehand, how to engage. And then hearing him afterwards talking about how he facilitated, constantly just using the conversational language that he used. And even a few days ago we had a conversation and he just goes back again to the conversational way of engaging and leading. And so for me, that was a win, that some of the leaders really caught on to it then and then started doing that wherever they found themselves. 

Kate: Yes, that was very much something we were trying to do with the event a couple of weeks ago that you joined us at, that is pass on the vision for using a conversational approach in the organisation. And I do think that people got that in a new way from having spent a couple of days working with a different approach to how to do a meeting, for example. But also to continue the conversation after they leave with others and use a conversational approach with their staff. One question I have is that, I guess, you like us have globally scattered staff and you can’t possibly be with everyone all at once. You can’t gather everyone into one room. And I envy people who work in organisations, where everyone’s in the same building or on the same site, or maybe they have three sites. And they think that’s difficult! We have, you know, over 4,000 staff scattered around the world and we can never get everyone in one room, or even on one Zoom call. So I’m interested to hear how other people engage and create these conversations, whether virtually or by travelling around? 

Reinhold: I think it’s about leaders, and taking leaders on a journey, and equipping them to do that and they need to discern their own contexts as well. You know, because the global context is also different from what people experience in regions, or on a national level.[21:13] One of the things that I realised as I reflected back on those earlier days and even that initial intervention, debriefing the intervention, reflecting on the intervention myself and also with others. And you always ask yourself “How could you have done this better?”. And one of the things that I realised was I could have given people who are coming to this for the first time… because there was quite a bit of tension because people didn’t know what to expect, it wasn’t the normal way of doing things. And sometimes the tension is good because it brings out things. And I later on came across just a few short articles that describe this a little bit more. And I realised even if I had access to that and just had given that to them beforehand to start framing what conversational leadership, conversational organisations, are all about, that may have helped a little bit. When we debriefed afterwards, people then said, “Okay, I understand now to a degree”. And then, even the ones that I spoke to, they still pushed back and had questions. I then sent them these articles, and then we had conversations, again and they said, “Now some of these things make sense to me”. So I realised, leadership and some of the equipping resources, language, that we give to leaders as they do this is critical for them to do that and make sure that it actually goes throughout the organisation. 

Kate: It’s very much a process, a journey of learning, of adjusting, to seeing things differently.

…

Nelis:  I find it fascinating, what you are saying Reinhold, that it’s got to be done sort of in dialogue with people with whom we actually have contact. You can’t you can’t just mandate this across the organisation from a distance. It requires a sense of proximity and that’s of course immediately the challenge  because the topic you’re dealing with, of inclusion and diversity, these are deeply personal topics that you can’t just mandate. Can you share some of your practical stories of some of how that works in your organisation?

Reinhold: At the moment I say a lot of that revolves around interventions. For me, the whole diversity is important, who do we have in the room? Even looking at it from a hierarchical point of view, to make sure that it’s not just your executive or middle-level leaders. That actually, I’m inviting some of the people who just joined a few months ago, younger people, into this conversation. Even with this intervention, one of the key things that we will be working on is leadership, leadership styles, how do we see leadership? Just the whole transactional versus relational leadership. And, again, if you grow in terms of relational leadership, then it opens up spaces for conversation. Then you do this more, more and more. So for me a big part of that is just looking at how we model this, but also in tension with our leadership development, to help expand their understanding of what leadership is and how to make sense as leaders and how to navigate things as leaders] So right now it’s around these interventions and then, and trusting, we’re always talking about capacity building, we’re talk about multiplication. How can we multiply people who can do this throughout the organisation rather than, again, being dependent on a few experts that can facilitate more conversational approaches to organisational life.

Kate: Can you share something with us about your experience, your organisation’s experience, of change processes, the positives and the negatives, whether traditional or conversational, how have you seen that working out? 

Reinhold: Yeah, and that’s an important question Kate. Because again if we study this, there are proponents of conversational leadership and then there are those  who are more traditional change management approaches, and then there are people who are perhaps more in the middle between those two. And I think, you know, the traditional approaches – whether that’s a reality or an assumption– but the predictability that it provides the people know, how we are going to do this process, you know, there’s a research phase, and then you come up with a strategic plan and a rollout and measurement and all of that. And so it gives people that sense of, they know what to expect, the predictability. And then there’s often for some humans a need for them.

Nelis: For safety? 

Reinhold: For safety, yes. I realised with our organisations that some of our structures and systems and processes are so deeply embedded, that to just have a conversational approach it will always raise questions about, “Okay, what does this mean in terms of our structures or processes? How do we measure these things, particularly, how do we evaluate this?” You know, which is a little bit more difficult with conversational approaches. So I think it gives people that sense of predictability. Whereas the conversational approach, some of the benefits, is that it enables wider participation, it enables creativity, greater creativity within an organisation, innovation, novelty, new ways of things coming up. I think it must be Suchman who wrote about this, that one person makes a suggestion, somebody else, person B, hears the suggestion and then they add to that, and it takes on a new form. And person C takes that suggestion, it takes on a whole new form. None of them on their own would have come up with this, but because the conversation takes place there’s novelty that emerges, that you couldn’t even say one person would have come up with this genius idea. Just the fact that it allows space for that. But I think there’s also challenges with a conversational approach. It takes a lot of time. It can provoke resistance because, you know, time is money. People want to plan. People want to know exactly. And so the uncertainty can provoke resistance, and how to navigate that. And just a willingness to sit with the unknown. I think those are some of the challenges for me with the conversational approaches.

Kate: I’m interested that you mentioned speed there. Clare raised an issue in our last episode about what do you do when things are urgent?  A conversational approach takes time. And sometimes you just can’t take the time to do that, and you have to make decisions urgently. I just wanted to ask for your perspective on that. 

Reinhold: Of course, there are times that, you know, an urgent issue can mean life or death and you need to make those decisions. But sometimes, whose “urgent” is it, you know, how urgent is it, really? Can we take a few more days? Or is it just because we’re used to this is the way it should be done? So who assesses, who determines how urgent something is? So one of the things that I’ve done in this includes just coming to terms with who I am in leadership and working in a context where there’s a certain defined way of leadership that I’m not comfortable with, but I’ve assimilated and done it that way many times, or for a long time. I remember having to facilitate a conversation with our leadership team. And I know what our expectations at the end of those discussions are: “Okay. Now, we need to summarise it. What are the key points? What are the action points? What is the timeline? When is this going to happen?” That’s the expectation. And I said to the team, you know, I’m grateful for all of the input. I’ve heard that, but I also want to be transparent that I’m not ready to actually come to that point of saying, okay summarise this and next steps and all of that. Because even as I sat there, I recognized that there were voices in the meeting that I have not heard on this issue that I believe have something to say. And maybe it’s because of the fact that we speak in English sometimes. Sometimes, it’s a personality issue, that some of us need a little bit more time to process and then we just feel we need to make this rushed decision. So I said, “Well for one, I feel there’s a few people, other people I want to engage with and get their input, before I can actually make this decision”. But at the same time I can’t keep them waiting indefinitely. So my arrangement with them was, “I will come back to you in a week and have it summarised and give some kind of way forward, rather than doing it now. And we leave it where it is right now.” And once they heard me explain this to them, it was “Okay, no, we can live with that”. 

Kate: And even if something is urgent we need to make sure we have the right people speaking into this. You know, we can often default to just getting into a little huddle of leaders when we have an urgent decision to be made quickly. And actually, we would benefit from taking a few more hours, maybe a few more days to reach out and ask people at different levels in the organisation for their input on the decision and then it will be a better decision as a result. 

Reinhold: It helps people to at least have some time frame, that is what I find. You can say to them, “Okay. We will come back to you in a certain period of time”. Then, at least for those who are more linear, they have some marker. And then you can do the work that needs to be done and then get to that particular space. And even if it requires more conversation because sometimes it’s not that urgent anymore, but at least they have some kind of idea as to when we get feedback, or take a look at next steps. 

Nelis: I like your balance there, maintaining forward movement, but also framing the time, but also creating space for the right voices to speak into that. And I was fascinated by your comment about language being an issue there, or people who need more time to think. I think there’s a huge cultural component, actually. I constantly see that. You’ve got, often, the loud dominant Western voices who speak up first. And if you don’t give it more time, those will be the only voices. 

Reinhold: Conversational approaches have inherent biases built into them. And sometimes they are unconscious and we need to surface them in order to help us. So one of them would be the language bias that we talked about, the fact that we speak in English, you know, even for somebody like me English is my third language. I can express myself reasonably well in English. But English speakers don’t see the mental energy that it takes, you know, to be able to engage with them on a conversation around the table and having to quickly make a decision. You’re global leaders, you are aware of this. And, Nelis, English is not your first language, either. 

Nelis: So, Kate is the only one who doesn’t have to think right now!

Kate: I’ve lived in other countries and I’m aware of the strain and the tiredness of speaking in another language that’s not your own. One thing we’ve done is when we’ve had global staff conversations where we haven’t all been in the same space and we’ve asked people to group in their organisational units having conversations. Some of those have taken place in French, or Spanish or Korean, and then we ask for the feedback, and feedback is usually in English. We ask for all the groups to feed back to the leadership. So that is one way around it, having language specific groupings. 

…

Nelis: Are there other aspects than language that you would like to bring out when you look at those cultural dynamics? 

Reinhold: Yes, so language would be one. And I like what you said Kate, and I think, you know, just the issue of affinity group conversations. So, even if you have a larger group, larger conversation, can you have affinity group conversations? And how that is fed back, whether that affinity group being a language group, but it could be a gender issue as well. And so, the other issue at play here is the power issue. Particularly in multicultural, diverse contexts, we come in with an assumption of a very egalitarian worldview that everybody’s equal because we’re in the room, but that’s not true. We need to discern when we are together in these rooms, what are the power factors at play in this room that would affect how well we engage in this conversation. And I just mentioned gender. In some places being a man, it implicitly carries a certain weight, what I say. And so what does it mean for women in that room? Well, how do we create space for them perhaps to have a conversation around their own table? And say, this is how we feel, but one woman cannot necessarily speak up on behalf of all, you know, so…  Or, generationally as well, you know, one of the things that I’ve learned even in these diverse conversations is, there would be younger people there who feel that they can speak up because perhaps they even come from an egalitarian worldview. So they’ve always been encouraged in their families with their parents and so on. And this is just how it’s nurtured over the years. But then there are young people who are in that room, that just because of how they grew up, that they would not speak up. So for me, just during those coffee breaks or lunch breaks to go and sit with them or take them aside or go for a walk and say, “What do you make of this meeting? What do you sense in all of that?”. And I always get incredible insights from them. And I may challenge and encourage them and say I will create space and safety for you in the room to actually come and say what you just said, depending on where the person is at. But you know, just between a leader, when they feel affirmed, “Oh, this matters, this is important. Oh, I can say it in the meeting”. So we build people up. So to be aware of the power dynamics in the room, and again, power dynamics can be diverse. Race is a power, and I speak to many people in the majority world… Being from a particular ethnic group, can mean you have power in a group. So whether you’re white or whether you’re, black African, but from a particular ethnic background in a certain group, you know. So the issue of racism can be a power issue. The issue of socio-economic background and where we come from, and money can be a power issue. So, it’s important to be aware of what are the power dynamics at play that determines who speaks up. This is the work that I’m really leaning into, that as we create these inclusive conversations, I believe that certain conditions need to be in place for truly inclusive conversations to take place, because merely having diversity in the room doesn’t mean it’s inclusive. 

Kate: No, not at all. In fact, one of the things we’re doing in our organisation right now is wanting to have a conversation around inclusion and belonging. But knowing if we open that up, we would probably mostly hear the Western voices. So we’re starting out with what we’re calling a Listening Project, deliberately going to our majority world colleagues, and interviewing around 50 actually, and making sure we create space to hear their voices, before we start the conversation. And I hope that that will give people the confidence to speak up when we have the whole staff conversation. But also we will then be able to bring those voices to the whole and sort of amplify them, because of those power issues that you mentioned.

Nelis: I realise often how invisible power is to the person who actually has it, because it’s sort of the air you breathe, and to be aware of that takes time and effort. I was just at an elders’ meeting of our church, and we talked about a very sensitive issue about a younger female person. It’s like well, do you realise that you go as the pastor, as the man, as the older person… It’s that sense of you don’t even know, you’re not even aware of how power plays into this conversation. I think it’s really important to bring that out and often across races, as you said… 

Kate: …and genders. I’ve definitely experienced that.

Nelis: And genders. Exactly, we’ve got to learn to see that, as the ones who have it, and I think every leader has to wrestle with that. 

Reinhold: Absolutely. And de-centre power, acknowledge it, recognize it, and power is not a bad thing in itself, it’s how power is used. Somebody once said, “Power needs to turn up trustworthy”. Can we trust power for the good of all? So, it’s a recognising it exists, but then de-centre it. And there’s a number of other conditions that are critical for us to consider if we are to have really inclusive conversations. 

Nelis: We need to start closing off. Is there any final piece that you would like to mention, an insight, you would like to share with our listeners, that you’re like, wow, if only they retain that we’re good? 

Reinhold: Conversational leadership, it opens up space for so much change in ourselves, in interpersonal relationships, in communities. We are in a very unhealthy space, virtual space, that we are in, where we see a lot of toxicity in terms of how we engage with one another. We need to foster this. And maybe just to the story, Nelis, when I’m in these international diverse meetings that we talk about certain issues. And yet when I walk out of the room and I find people from my affinity group, whatever that might be, then we talk about the meeting in the room. And we say, “Did you hear this? Did you notice this? This should have been talked about”. And somehow we don’t feel the freedom to have these conversations in the room. And really, those are the things that are generative, that will take us forward, get us to grow. And so, really to ask ourselves, “Why don’t we feel we can have these conversations?”. And it goes back to these issues around power in the room, around psychological safety. How do we create psychological safe spaces for us to have these conversations? But being brave to speak up.  I love the work of Mary Frances Winters. If there’s one resource that I’d recommend it’s a book that she wrote around inclusive conversations. She talks about grace and forgiveness, that we are going to make mistakes, we are going to step on each other’s toes. How do we extend that to each other? Facing our fear, our fragility. So, we need to work on those things in order to really have interpersonal relationships and team and organisational conversations that really take us forward. It’s focus on that but recognise that there need to be certain things in place to really generate inclusive generative conversations. 

Kate: Thank you Reinhold. I think we could talk for several more hours, but we’ll stop for now. We really appreciate you coming and sharing with us today, particularly on this intersection between conversational processes and inclusivity, which is so critical. 

Thank you for listening, everyone. We will be adding more resources and links to the show notes. So do check that out. And as always the transcript will be there as well. Thank you, Reinhold. Nelis, until next time! Thank you.

Episode 4

podcast with shownotes
Leading in Conversations
Leading in Conversations
Leading in Conversation – Episode 4
Loading
/

Show Notes

To learn more about Open Space Technology, visit this site.

Transcript

Nelis: We are together to discuss an event that happened where we put conversational leadership in practice. I’m excited to be here together with Kate, of course, but also with Clare, Johnstone and Samantha. So, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us! 

We would like to explore what happened in this event to see how conversational leadership works in a large group setting. It’s fresh in our minds and we want to explore different ideas. We want to go through first, maybe about vulnerability, creating containers, creating safe spaces. So, do any of you want to share how you felt that went? How did you experience that? 

Creating safe spaces for conversation

Johnstone: I think I really experienced the fact that the space was quite safe for me to express myself and I say so because you look at different things. First of all, is how the room is arranged, you know, how it’s structured, both the tables that were up front and the tables that were at the back. I like sitting at the back, I came and sat at the back and nobody came and said “Move” or whatever and so I just felt like I was comfortable. And then I looked at the colleagues, that we know each other, and right from the beginning, there was just this, you know, friendly atmosphere that people felt like, yeah, we can talk and laugh and be invited to this big conversation. 

Kate: So even though we were at a work event, it felt like we were amongst friends. I thought it felt very relaxed and comfortable. Did that feel the same way for others? 

Clare: Yes, it certainly did for me. I mean, most of the people in the room I already knew before, but it does make me wonder about the people that didn’t know as many people or maybe didn’t know most of the people there. So how do we keep working on thinking not just of those that were so happy to see each other after not seeing each other for a time but those that may not have.

Kate: Samantha, this was your first time with this particular group of leaders. How was that for you? Did you feel you could participate and speak up? 

Nelis: Actually, just for our audience, Samantha is from a minority background, she was one of the youngest people in the group. So, somewhat different from some of the others. You’ve often felt excluded in other groups. What made you feel at home, because you said, you felt at home. What concretely made you feel at home? 

Samantha: Yes. I was trying to reflect on that because I was pretty intimidated before coming, with the calibre of people that were going to be here and that I didn’t know almost anybody or only had seen their names in the organisational chart maybe. So I wasn’t sure how it would be but I think I was so impressed with the warmth and… when we would have a group conversation, the response, even to different people’s voices. When there were groups, that we were able to choose where to go was helpful. Honestly, I think in the beginning I looked a little bit for groups of people that I might feel more comfortable talking with even above the topic because there were several topics that I’d be interested in and that would end up being my deciding factor because if a space isn’t safe because of who else is there, then that’s that’s not necessarily going to be a very comfortable conversation, even if it’s a topic that you’re really interested in. 

Johnstone: I just wanted to add to that. I felt like the organisers had an intentionality to invite people to a safe space for conversation and to make it known to the participants that really we want this to be a free environment. And then beyond internationality there was some demonstration that that was actually happening. This is the first meeting I’ve been to and I’ve not been assigned a table group! See a lot of times we want to be intentional and say “So and so cannot sit with so and so because they think in a similar way”, or something like that, but here I was told you could just choose any table group, go sit there. You could choose whichever topic you want to talk to and the break time is going to be “fuzzy”. And you know, all those kinds of things that, you know, the leaders, conversation leaders were talking about really created that what I believe is a safe space for me to express myself to the issues that I believe are important. 

Clare: Well, I wonder how this fit in with the process of storytelling, and that, as people began to tell their authentic story and share those and you hear that, it makes you feel freer to tell your perspective and your authentic story for the topics, because some of them were pretty difficult, the topics that we grappled with. And so to me, that’s part of creating that vulnerability, if others model that vulnerability by talking about their personal stories and ups and downs, challenges, I think that helps those that may not feel as comfortable become more comfortable and relaxed. 

Nelis: We talked a little bit about room layout. Maybe for our listeners it’s interesting to hear how we had laid it out. We had a semicircle two-three rows deep where we really sat together like in a 40 people amphitheatre, where we were really talking to each other and I think that worked reasonably well. And then we have nicely decorated tables at the back where somebody had put a lot of effort into actually making it feel like a homey table. And I think those little touches make a difference. Any thoughts about the room layout, what you felt coming in, or thoughts you had? 

Clare: We were blessed with the room, which is light. It has lots of windows. And so, the beauty of the setting was clear. You didn’t feel claustrophobic at all. 

Kate: That’s really important, I think, for open conversations and free-flowing discussions.

Sam: I think too, though it was a big space, dividing the room up in those different sections also made it feel not too big, where you now are like lost in the space, but that you could turn your attention to one space and be in that in one kind of atmosphere and then switch to the tables and be in a different mind space and interactive space. And that allowed that flexibility for different ways of interacting –  different modes almost. And then later when people talked, then they could spread out to different areas.

Johnstone: Somebody has said that we know that there is a lot that can be achieved in Zoom meetings, so what do you do with physical meetings? And I found that comment  very helpful that physical meetings could be an opportunity for greater leadership building, greater ability to just converse as friends and dig deeper into topics, so that you don’t have to feel like, you know, this thing I can only say during break time. You can actually say what you want to say in the room. I think I found that to be helpful as well.

Using stories

Nelis: So people shared their own stories, and we wanted to talk about the storytelling in this event that was done both formally and informally, I think. So, what are your thoughts about how that was done? Maybe Kate, you can describe how we intended to use stories and then see how it was experienced?

Kate: Yes, so we used a couple of stories at the beginning of each of the sessions on the first two days and beforehand, we’d asked everyone coming to submit a story, no longer than a page, about something related to our topic, which was about shifting mental models in our organisation, looking at the mental models that are holding us back from making progress towards our vision. It was fascinating to see all of those coming in and we went through them and selected a few for each session that had some really clear mental models in them that provided a starting place for discussions. Really, we were looking for stories that had generative potential for discussion. And I think that worked really well, but I’d like to hear what the rest of you think about that. 

Clare: I thought that the stories that you chose were really good examples that helped us to think about the issue of mental models. And you know, some challenging, some positive elements, some difficult elements, but I think they really exemplified thinking through the mental model issues that we all have and you intentionally chose a variety of stories that helped us see those things. And not too many of them. Just having eight over those two days was good.

Johnstone: Over time I have realised that I communicate using stories. Stories can give us a lot to learn about certain situations. And so these were things that have happened, so they’re not like just stories that have been imagined. And how do we learn from them? And it was interesting when I was telling my first or even my second story, I could see the emotion in the room. I could see that, you know, when people get to a point of saying “Oh..” or whatever it is, you could feel like the story is communicating. 

Kate: How do you think stories work differently from a presentation? At a lot of our previous events we’ve had presentations with PowerPoints. How did you see stories playing out differently? Because this is something we’re experimenting with, obviously. 

Johnstone: Well, like Claire said, you know, the stories were well chosen beforehand, the ones that we used in the meeting. But I think the stories remove the whole conference from an academic sort of pursuit to something more real, something more natural. It gives us an opportunity to introspect. You know, I once read a story called ‘The Government Inspector’. At the end of it they say, somebody says, “Who are you laughing at? You’re laughing at yourselves.” Stories allow us to do those types of things, to laugh at ourselves, and then to change our course because we can actually see in retrospect, you know, how things can be different.

Kate: They sort of allow us to step outside of ourselves and look at ourselves, or look at the situation from a little bit of a distance don’t they, and you experience it differently from that perspective. 

Clare: They sort of naturally have a sort of a moral to ourselves that you’ve thought about this. And it’s like “Oh…” and it’s not often explicit. It’s usually implicit but because it’s a real story of some things that are really true, it puts the principles in an applied context and I think that really helps people to grapple with the principles in an applied situation. 

Johnstone: I wanted just to add that it was really good for the organisers, to flow with my story without asking me to say more about it. I was giving a real story about a real context, but I didn’t want that place to be shamed, or something like that. And so I chose to omit names of the country, I chose to omit names of people, and I just said the story. You know, after the meeting some people asked… and I still felt, I just think I want that to remain private. You can say the story without really shaming people and that was part of this that really was good.

Kate: That’s really important. And I don’t think it detracted at all from the value of that story that you shared, at all. 

Open Space Technology

Nelis: What we did at the end of those sets of two stories, we then as a group in that semicircle, we talked about – and we had flipcharts – what are the insights we are taking from this and what are the questions that this raises? We didn’t try to answer all the questions. We just raised them and said, what are the questions that we need to wrestle with? I think I was actually quite powerful. I was initially tempted, “Let me try to answer questions”. But no, let us sit with that together and those 20 minutes of looking at insights together as a group is so different from the facilitation team or a synthesis team trying to come to conclusions in a small group. This is all of us wrestling together and I was just amazed how powerfully that worked. Samantha, you were one of the scribes. I mean, we couldn’t keep up with the input that came! 

Samantha: I think that was a wonderful time, also building safety and respect and for me, getting to know different voices without having to talk to each one, you know. In that kind of arena, you start to hear different perspectives and get a feel for who it is that you might want to follow up with later and talk to, who have similar things that they’re thinking about or wrestling with. To have – again – it grounded in the stories that were just told that we have something to start from that is personal and were told from the voices of those who are in those situations, or saw those situations happening in their context, was really powerful for us to be able to then mull over it in a very respectful way. And I think the moderation also helped that. I think the way that you and the other moderator did it was very affirming of everyone’s voices. 

Nelis: I think that’s a key part. You always are affirming, “Yes, this perspective is an insight we need to hear”. 

Kate: So, one of the tools we used during this process was Open Space Technology and, Nelis, you led that part. Would you perhaps describe what we did there?

Clare: That’s a funny term. I’ve never heard that term before. 

Nelis: Yes. I love the term ‘technology’ because it is so low-tech, but Open Space Technology has a whole set of principles behind it, and those who are interested can look that up. We’ll provide the link in the show notes. But we didn’t introduce all of that. We asked people to basically come forward, to put a topic on a piece of paper and then be ready to be part of a group to talk about it. They could come up with any topic, but often it was grounded in the stories we had talked about before. Then we ask people to basically go to the group that they wanted to, it could be two people, it could be 10 people, feel free to move around between groups. And I was a bit nervous, I mean, are we going to get people to come forward? Will the topic be relevant? Will people feel comfortable moving around, but they did. 

Kate: Yes, it really worked. I’ve never seen that tool being used before. 

Johnstone: I just wanted to say, I never knew that whatever you are doing had a name. What I thought we were doing was basically to move from a point of a group having internalised the stories and talked about the insights and questions and we were just going to a space where you pursued what you wanted to pursue, alongside the things that had been discussed. And so I didn’t even know that you guys were using something that is absolutely researched and written. But having said that I just wanted to say that that was a very, very effective way of doing things. 1) I am enthusiastic to discuss something that is so important to me. And so, when people went forward and they picked topics that were important and I had the freedom to choose which group to attend to, I went to places where I felt like, a) I had a contribution or b) that this is an issue that I needed to grapple with. I went there to listen to other people that are grappling with the same issue. But at the same time, I went there to tell them that I have a perspective to offer, you know, and I could be able to do that in a very effective way. And as I just found that to be a very helpful part of this process which we’ve just had this week. 

Samantha: I think there’s also elements of having the vulnerability and creating safe spaces in this as well as because you’re being vulnerable to say, “I’m not controlling what’s happening now, the agenda, and I’m letting the participants take hold and ownership of this as well”. So you would stand there awkwardly in the beginning and that actually gives us a chance as a community also to respond to that vulnerability and to say, you know, “I don’t want the person up front to feel alone”. I will step up and also be brave and contribute something. And then you do know it’s going to be relevant for this group because someone has been vulnerable in saying, “Here’s what I’m interested in. I’d like to talk about that. So would anyone like to join me?”. And then they went vulnerably to sit at a table and invite people into that space. And that was another thing, you could see certain tables would get filled up. The ones that were empty would also be a welcoming space for someone to say “I don’t want those people to feel as alone and I’ll join them”. And so I think that there’s a lot of deep relational aspects to this Open Space Technology.

Johnstone: One of the things that I found intriguing is that… there was a time when I was hosting a conversation. I wrote something on the paper and we had six or so people come to my table. But they all came to approach that topic from a slightly different angle. The good thing is that when we talked about it, how quickly we arrived at the core, the commonality, that was making us want to discuss this. And so one of the things that we did was to really redefine the issue. So we ended up even talking a little bit about the topic and tweaking what I had written, to the level that everybody was now comfortable to make a contribution to that. And when they got comfortable, then they started making a contribution to that, there’s just a lot of gold to mine out of what we were saying. 

Kate: I think we touched on this in one of the previous episodes didn’t we, Nelis? That, sometimes you’ll frame a discussion with what you think is the topic. Then once you get under way, the real issue emerges and it sounds like that was part of the experience for you: that you’d labelled it at one level, but actually, when everyone got talking you realised what the real core issue was. That’s really interesting.

Nelis: I find it interesting that it is so different from predefined questions. So, group processes almost always have a set of three or four questions that you’re supposed to answer and they’re always frustrating, is my experience. Always! And somehow people don’t need the questions. You’ve got a topic and people start to talk and start digging and that free-flowing element actually is so much richer. 

Samantha: I think that the modality of those Open Space technology allows it. I mean, from what I’ve read it’s very intentional that people come with their own question or their own ideas. It’s not like other conversations that are so forced, to say “You have to talk about this topic and you have to talk about it in these ways”. So then that allows people to come with their own input. And it also creates a very natural flat structure where there is no expert necessarily, everyone is the expert in that situation. So there is a little bit more openness.

Nelis: What I found fascinating is no group had an appointed facilitator and you didn’t need one!

Johnstone: You know, we came in from different countries and so time differences were a factor. In many meetings that I have been to, in the afternoon you see people standing, you know, on the walls, fighting sleep. My own observation of this meeting is that it was animated throughout. Nevermind we met from 8 to 6, and that’s a long time to be meeting, to be talking for that matter. But there is some seamless flow that seems to have happened that kept the group so well engaged, you know, throughout this conversation. 

Sense making

Nelis: Let’s move on to our last topic because we’ve had lots of conversation but there is an element of sense-making together. You want to draw things to conclusions. We did that at the end of each day to gather together and say “What are we learning?”. As a Christian organization asking ourselves, “What is God telling us through all this?”. Any thoughts about that sense-making? And the importance of that? And maybe Clare, you’ve got some thoughts about even relating that to urgency. So that this isn’t just talk. 

Clare: Yes, well, one of the things that I was wondering about in this process, since we are focusing on the conversational leadership method of making change—which is particularly useful for complex, adaptive changes—but sometimes even within those, there’s some urgent things that need to be dealt with. Conversational leadership by nature is going to lend itself to gradual emerging solutions. And so it takes time. But within that, there may be some things that if you don’t pay attention to this now you’re not going to have time to finish this conversation because they really are existential threats, for example. So how to balance those two things? I felt like it would be good before we close to help people remember that this is really an important model, but it’s not the only model. You have to be able to discern what kinds of change processes are appropriate for this particular issue you’re dealing with: is it adaptive, is it tactical? What does that mean? 

Samantha: Can you remind me – or I guess maybe reveal to me – which different parts during the days were planned to be the intentional sense-making portions, and maybe describe what those different activities were like.

Nelis: There were smaller and larger parts of that. After each block, we always – after the group conversations – got together asked ourselves “What is emerging?” So that was part of the collective sense-making process. And at the end of each day, we got together in the big semicircle and then really started to dig a bit deeper and I was always giving more time to ask ourselves, “So what are our conclusions? What do we want to sit with and take home?”. So that is also part of that sense-making. And then there’s also an individual sense-making which was planned, that we asked every participant to work on two mental model shifts that they’re going to be held accountable to. That’s very concrete, action-oriented: “What are the steps you can take to address this? And what are you going to work on with your supervisor?” That starts to address that urgency part. There is something that needs to be done at the end. And that was also a planned sense-making part. 

Johnstone: You know, personally, my perspective has been, you know, some of the mental models, we were talking about are things that I have grappled with over time, and I could easily see the group sense-making process. I struggled a bit with the personal sense-making process. The group sense-making processes, yes, these are things that we need to be talking about as a group. These are things that we need to dig in and we need to get to some conclusions about some of these things. But then I think when that was mixed by outside perspective – somebody came and clearly offered a presentation. And I must say that he had been listening to us throughout the week and he was very intentional in doing so. I believe that his presentation really responded so well to some of the things that we were trying to grapple with. All of a sudden I just felt like being ripped apart and just getting deep into things that personally apply to me. It was at that point for me in the conference that I started saying “Yeah, stop thinking about others out there. And think about what are you going to do about these things?” And that was very, very powerful for me. 

Nelis: We talk about disruption in our podcast often. You need new insights from somebody outside the system often, to create novelty, and I think that outside voice of somebody who’s in a different organisation can be very powerful and it was.

Kate: Definitely, so the first two days we were sharing our own stories, we were a little bit introspective in a sense, but I think the stories helped us to dig down and unpack what are these unhelpful mental models that we need to address as an organisation. And then, the third day, we had our external speaker come and talk on a topic that had actually emerged as a major topic from our previous two days. 

Nelis: We didn’t know that!

Kate: We actually didn’t know that that topic would emerge so strongly through those first two days when we invited him, but actually he was able to bring novelty into the discussion and from outside, from his own experience, from his academic research, and his own organisation. And I think that worked really, really well, and we can’t take the credit for organising that, it just happened. 

Clare: Well, for me, what I found that gave us such a way to grapple with it is that he started with a lot of stories, personal stories, his own experience, very vulnerable. And so these very topics that we were grappling with, he modelled. I don’t think you told him that’s the way you should present but he used the very powerful thing of helping us to see his own personal journey, as well as some insights from his experiences and his journey as a leader that really brought a lot of insight. 

Kate: Now, what’s interesting is that he and I were on the same Masters study program where we both encountered conversational leadership a couple of years back. We’ve both been experimenting and talking about that since. So I think he was already coming from that perspective that stories, narratives, that’s what changes things. That’s what seeds change.

Johnstone: Another thing that I believe that led to concretisation of thoughts is the self correction that I saw happen in the room. So somebody would give a story and then there would be that time for responses. At some point, there is a story that was given around a certain mental model and the way the room responded to the story, you didn’t need a leader to be the one saying “This is wrong”, this needs to be done differently. As peers of that person, we were able to sort of bring light and our own contribution to that. And sense-making happens at that particular point, because sometimes you feel like “I’m in this part of the world. I am so unique. There are no other people that have my situation”, but you come and bring it to such a diverse group and then people just start telling you how these things could be and that can be very powerful. 

Samantha: Yeah. I was thinking, maybe you said it in the very beginning, about this conversational model, is how it was like a flock of birds moving, I was thinking about how that is. It’s like when you study these flocks of birds, they don’t have some lead, like lead-bird. Flocks that move in that way, they all kind of draft next to each other,  they calibrate according to what birds are around them. So, I think in that we found a way of overlapping with each other, complementing each other, taking our own, internal convictions and personal insights and tuning them to each other, attuning to each other. So we were able to adjust to one another and therefore start to really have a sense of collaboration and unity that I think  by yesterday morning, when we had that really incredible session there was such a sense that we were hearing from each other. And again, for our faith, that we had a sense that God was speaking to us in a unified way, that we could hear, a voice that we could hear and it was, it was drawing us in a certain direction. 

Clare: To me, what was interesting is the topics that ended up being in focus in his discussion with us were really difficult topics, really painful topics, things that are difficult to change. Heart level change is needed. And those tend to be ones which become divisive in other processes. People stake their perspective because they feel maybe accused or they feel “Now you just don’t understand”, and become defensive. Whereas I didn’t sense that at all in these difficult topics. I’m sure that there are people at various levels of struggling, but in terms of how we process those things together, I think there was a real openness to say, “We all have something to learn here”.

Johnstone: I feel like this week has been like a journey. I can compare it to a journey. And in a journey we have people who can drive, walk or run faster than others. And as we started exploring stories, I feel like there are people who, you know, got there earlier. First day they would feel like “This is my mental model, this is what I want to work on. And they were starting to make conclusions for themselves. Other people arrived there the second day. Some people like me arrived on the third day. But the important thing is that the whole room arrived by yesterday and that is very, very important. I don’t know whether this is something that you can orchestrate or whether in planning and doing stuff you also have to trust God, to use the resources that you have to his own glory. Because I just think that I have seen such huge impact and huge transformation in our attitudes, in our thoughts, and as you speak to different people, people can say, “You know, I never put a name to this. Now I have a name to it”. You know, I’ve had a lot of testimonies that have been coming out of this meeting, and I’m just wondering, you know, it’s a journey, different people arriving there at different times, but definitely seeing the hand of God, as well, in what was happening here this week. 

Nelis: Thank you. I think we need to come to a conclusion. 

Kate: It’s been great to hear your experiences. We need our listeners to know that we didn’t pay them to say these nice things, that we didn’t prime them in any way or prepare them, they just shared from the heart. We’re very grateful to Clare and Johnstone and Samantha for giving us this time. Thank you.

Nelis: And I’d like to invite our listeners to join the conversation as well. Feel free to put your comments in the website and let’s journey together.

Kate: Thank you for listening.

Episode 3

podcast with shownotes
Leading in Conversations
Leading in Conversations
Leading in Conversation – Episode 3
Loading
/

Shownotes

Emergence: A disruption in the ongoing social construction of reality is stimulated or engaged in a way that leads to a more complex re-organization.

Narrative change: A change to one or more core story-lines that influence shared meaning-making takes place.

Generativity: A generative image is introduced or surfaces that provides new and compelling alternatives for thinking and acting.

Definitions taken from: Bushe & Marshak: Companion to the BMI Series in Dialogic OD

Further reading:Bushe, G.R. & Storch, J. (2015) Generative Image: Sourcing Novelty, from: From Bushe, G. R. & Marshak R. J. (eds.) (2015) Dialogic Organization Development: The Theory and Practice of Transformational Change.

Transcript

Hello and welcome back to Leading in Conversation. Today we’re going to talk about something that was a huge “Aha” moment for me when I first encountered it, and has been critical in my understanding of how change happens since then. As you might have already picked up, I’m a big fan of Gervase Bushe and Bob Marshak’s dialogic organisational development (DOD). Conversational leadership and dialogic organisation development are not exactly the same thing largely because organisational development is usually done from an external consultant perspective. However, they’re part of the same family of approaches and they have the same goals in mind. Bushe and Marshak describe three, underlying processes, which are key to enabling change. We want to dig into those today, don’t we Nelis? 

Yes, absolutely. I hope that each of these three can be unpacked to the point that they start making sense and how they work together. 

Do you want to  run through what those three are before we start digging into them?

Yes, happy to. So first is emergence and disruption. The second one is narrative change. And the third is generative images. It’s really neat how those three go together. 

Yes, they really do work together well, don’t they? I think a key principle behind these change principles is that language and how meaning is made, and the narratives which guide people’s experiences, are central to organisational change. 

And that’s why conversation is so important. Language and communication kind of go together, don’t they?

So first up: emergence and disruption. Nelis, I know you are fascinated by the application of principles of complexity science to leadership and daily life. Can you talk a little bit about the concept of emergence and the role disruption has to play in creating novelty and therefore change? 

Yes, I’d love to. As you said, I’m always fascinated by that idea of complexity. It comes from the Natural Sciences and it flows deeply into what we’re talking about, that are social realities because social realities are by definition complex. Emergence is a term from complexity theory that describes how patterns emerge that are not planned, or are not obvious from the underlying things. So you have all of these underlying patterns, but they create something completely new, that is actually unpredictable. In the social sciences, that means that this happens without planning, without anyone thinking that through ahead of time, it happens through self-organisation. A neat example is a flock of birds and then you see those beautiful patterns of birds flying in all sorts of incredible shapes. But what happens is that each bird just references a few other birds around them and together this fascinating cloud happens. And people in organisations do the same. They don’t think ahead of time how to organise themselves, completely. You just have a few reference points and you act on that. The effect is often surprising and dynamic. So when you understand that, you start to think quite differently about organising social reality because they’re often self organised. And that is true for change as well. Because to implement change is not something like, you just build a different machine. It is influencing how those things work together, how those clouds of birds, or clouds of people interact with one another. So and that’s just hugely impactful in the way you talk about change because organisations are always changing whether we recognize it or not. And as a leader you are part of that cloud. You’ve got to go with the flow while finding ways to set up conditions that help people to kind of create new reference points, to think about things differently, and to get a new understanding of what is actually happening. 

And that’s where narrative change and generative images will come in later. But what about disruption? What does that have to do with emergence? 

Complexity science has seen that change actually doesn’t happen the way you often think. Systems are often incredibly stable. They don’t change, because people compensate. Actually, nature does the same. Stable systems are the norm but then because there’s underlying complexity at some point you get to a ‘Tipping Point’ when were suddenly change happens, and it’s often quite unexpected, and that’s what you can call the bifurcation point. When you’re in that space of systems that are becoming kind of unstable, that’s when disruption happens. Then you can flip the completely new pattern in creating a change that you didn’t expect. And again, that is emerging, you can’t completely predict that. 

Yes, and obviously disruption is nothing new. Most leadership approaches assume disruption at some point and a lot of it happens, without our involvement, or desire. Consider the last two years. I was reflecting on this earlier. We can probably understand the power of disruption to bring novelty and change in a whole new way, after the global pandemic experience. Just thinking of, for example, the speed at which vaccines developed, and the way the scientific community made changes to their processes so quickly to work together around the globe to bring these vaccines into being. Also, the shift to remote working, which we could never have imagined before really at this scale. But, you know, half the people down this side of my street, we’re all working at home now. In the summer we can hear our Zoom conversations through the open windows. And Zoom itself, the explosion of Zoom: even the owners of Zoom could not have planned or dreamt that their product would become a household name, or even a verb – to zoom – across the entire world. No strategic planner could have planned that expansion of Zoom, which the disruption of the pandemic caused. It’s incredible when you think about what’s happened because of the pandemic. A great example of emergence through disruption. 

Yes, and then the question is, of course, to what extent can you induce that, can you create change? Because the leader’s role is to help organisations change to deal with new realities. And the reality is that most systems, as I said earlier, resist change, so it’s not as easy as you think – just to throw a wrench in the gearbox is not a way to create helpful change. It’s an art in a way, to deal with that change, with that complexity, and leverage what happens towards positive new emerging patterns. As a leader you look for opportunities to work with the disruptions that are already happening, and help people to cope with that and to create a way to adapt together and it really is about doing that together and that helps by giving new points of view, new insights, by creating deep discussion. We talked last time about diversity because that’s what it takes. It’s all those viewpoints to help the whole system to deal with that disruption in a helpful way. 

Yes, I think we probably need to add the caveat here that, you know, we’re not promoting inflicting disruption on people, on organisations, on staff. It’s not pleasant. Although sometimes disruption can be very creative. But we have a duty of care as leaders not to inflict pain and suffering on our staff if at all possible! So what we’re talking about, like you said, is working with disruption as it occurs, as many as all of us have done in the last two years, to engage the potential of those unplanned disruptions. One example for us is that it meant that in some of our organisational units the growth of national leadership, as expats have had to return to their passport countries, and that’s, you know, serendipitous change, as we’ve been working towards that anyway, but it was accelerated in some places by the disruption of the pandemic. 

But we’re also talking about finding gentle ways to seed change and see what happens when that disruption occurs. 

Let me say something here because I think it’s important to understand that in some ways the disruptions will happen so we work with it. Another part of it, I think, that also Bushe and Marshak talk about is, that you actually make the disruption that’s happening visible, because a lot of people don’t realise that disruption is actually happening and then go to the group with that and say, hey, have you seen what’s actually happening? You suddenly then create a new dynamic that allows people to come to grips with that and you introduce disruption that you didn’t artificially create, but that was there anyway.

Sometimes we need to reframe disruption or crises for ourselves so that we see them in a positive light, not a negative light. What was it you were saying last episode about survival or opportunity mindset? 

Yes, the opportunity mindset versus the survival. And yes, that gets us actually to the second point we wanted to talk about because that’s a very natural bridge into narratives.

…

So, narrative change. What are narratives? 

Narratives are the stories we tell ourselves to make sense about the world. To make sense of the world, to make sense of the organisation we work in, about our role in the organisation, what a stakeholder soes, a customer, etc. So, that’s all built up of stories that are told to each other, to ourselves. Narratives are very powerful, enabling us to think about the reality in ways that make sense to us. It’s that sense-making part. But they can also restrict us because it can stop us looking at things from a different way because that narrative then becomes like the glasses through which you see the world. 

Do you have any examples of that?

One example, at the beginning of the new era of the pandemic, was that I noticed that I was walking into the bank with a mask on and I just had to laugh at myself. Like, you would have been arrested as a potential bank robber, if you had walked into the bank just a year before. Now, I would have been thrown out of the bank, if I didn’t have a mask! 

Yes, we all do it. Yes. I’ve been into a bank, wearing a mask and never thought about that before. But the narrative changed there, it’s okay to wear masks in banks now. 

If you did a little bit deeper, the narrative is, the risk of getting Covid is much higher than the risk of you being a robber! It is that thinking about risk that changed.

Definitely. Yes, that’s really interesting. Isn’t it? For these sorts of changes to occur, of course, we talked – I think in the first episode – about how the philosophical background to conversational leadership is social constructionism. So narratives have to be socially agreed upon for them to work. And the shift really only works if everyone’s agreeing that together. If you had just suddenly decided that you could walk into a bank, wearing a mask because you were afraid of catching something, but no one else was working off that same narrative, you would have been arrested. So there’s this element of social agreement around the narratives, but we don’t really discuss it ever. They are agreements that come into being, they gradually emerge, I guess, unless you create them deliberately. 

So let’s go a little bit deeper than the superficial thing with banks. A really important example in society at large is how we look at the role of the Western world, for example. So we used to see ourselves as the good guys who came to civilise the rest of the world. Now in hindsight we’re looking at that, and saying “actually we were conquerors and we were trying to exploit others”. That narrative was deeply seated. Everyone believed it. Everyone was like, “For them to be civilised, they’ve got to go through this stage and it’s our job to do that”.

Yes, it excused so many crimes against humanity that were done, that we look at now and think “How could that have been socially acceptable?” 

Because we had inherited it and that’s the glasses through which we saw everything happen. Yeah, that happens in organisations the same. So what is the story behind the organisation, what are we telling ourselves about why we exist? And that’s incredibly powerful and that can be leveraged for incredible good, and be an excuse for incredible crimes.

So can you explain more about how narratives work in organisations? 

I think they’re often visible in things like branding, and identity. So, it’s the story that the organisation tells itself about, as I said, why they exist. It can actually be seen in what you celebrate. What’s being rewarded in the organisation? What are people called out for as examples for others? 

What do we feature in our internal newsletters? 

Exactly. So that’s very interesting. And so we are working in an organisation that does language work, so, an example for us is around multilingualism. So we assume that our work was with single languages, people groups that spoke just one language and we come and help them develop their language. We called that the heart language. Now, we realise more and more there’s been disruption and our realisation of the narrative has become unsettled – that actually, most people don’t speak one language anymore. 

Most people in the world speak multiple languages. Most people are multilingual because we are so much more connected these days, apart from obviously a very few remote places where there are people living and just speaking one language to each other. But even then probably someone from that community connects externally and speaks a trade language or something, but there are obviously those places. But yes for most people multilingualism is their reality now, so we had to shift in our organisation. Do you want to share a little bit about that? 

Yes, so we started talking about that. We started to confront that reality because it’s uncomfortable, because if your whole organisation was set up to work with those single languages, people speaking a single language, you have to change your methods of work completely. So we had to talk about this. “Is this true? How does this work? Do people have a heart language as such?.” We created discussions around that, helping people to get used to the idea, did some videos about it, testimonies etc. and then people started to embrace that very gradually. 

Yes, they did an excellent job. I remember watching videos of our colleagues explaining, our multilingual colleagues explaining, what it meant to them, and how they change from one language to another in a different setting, things like that. It was great. I learned a lot. 

And then you start to adapt the way you work. So suddenly you do your effort in a language community very differently because you realise they need different kind of support, because the assumption that they only speak one language isn’t true, so they need different publications, education systems look differently, etc. 

So what does it actually take to change the narrative? You’ve mentioned a few things there that we did: videos and I guess conversation. 

So, yes, that’s going to be the answer: conversational leadership. Leading in conversation. I think part of it, and we touched on that, is providing new information, so that people can see a different reality. So you need to tell different stories like the video you talked about, and start to use different language, etc. And we started to put it in our core statements, our values. But I don’t think that that is how the core change itself happened. It is just a reflection of that change we already had happened.

You’re right. Actually, we did that after the fact almost, catching up with the reality, that now, we want to embed this narrative change into our core statements, our values, etc, but that wasn’t what we led with, because that doesn’t often cause change, changing the core statements.

Yes. So it’s introducing it at events, in conversations, providing that information, helping people wrestle with it and giving it time because this is not a top-down decision that you suddenly start doing that, because it’s beliefs that need to change. 

…

So that brings us to another way of bringing about change—and I think we’re just starting to see the power of that—is the idea of generative images. Which is then the third of those three things we wanted to talk about 

Yes, this is my favourite as, you know, my current area of research. I’ll probably want to talk about this at great length in future episodes. I was doing some more reading, digging around, before this podcast recording and there’s not very much out there written about it. A lot of the credit for this concept belongs to Gervase Bushe. I’ve not really seen it referred to in this way outside of dialogic organisational development. I may be wrong. I may not be looking in the right places. But yes, it’s an exciting new way, I think, of using language to connect with what motivates people. It’s different to a vision statement.

Definitely. The idea of generative images has of course has two words in it: generative and images. I love that word generative. So generative is the idea of generation, of creation. It is about something that becomes fruitful. So the idea of something that’s generative is really exciting because it then produces new ideas. It triggers new concepts, it pushes people to think in new ways. I love that about the idea of generative images. 

So a generative image is a combination of words or pictures or other symbolic media. It’s in my experience, it’s, you know, it’s not images. It’s sort of word pictures or a couple of words which conjure up an image, that provides new ways of thinking about reality, whether that’s society in general or your organisation or your business, and it can be introduced deliberately or sometimes it just emerges. And I think the really powerful thing about generative images is that they allow people to see something in a new light. And to think differently about it. It opens up the way for new insights, decisions and actions and you know, enables us to, as you said, go beyond our existing thinking about something and present these new possibilities. I think some of the key characteristics of generative images are that they’re compelling and attractive and they just kind of draw you even though you’re not quite sure why, they make you want to act differently. Or a good generative image will make you want to act differently. But it’s also something that’s quite hard to define or explain. And I’ll explain that in a bit or maybe you can actually – the ambiguity around a good generative image increases the generative possibilities it has, and maybe you want to talk a little bit about sustainable development, Nelis?

Yes, but first, I find that very undefined-ness is what makes it powerful.  That has to do with again what we talked about in complexity. It’s not all thought out ahead of time. It creates possibilities, it is in that sense, embraces the idea of unpredictable outcomes and it enables people to be creative, to come up with their own ideas of how to obtain it. And so yes, the example you mentioned about sustainable development is actually often cited as a good generative image, because it has that internal tension. So, in the past being sustainable and doing development seem to be completely at odds with each other as they were two things that couldn’t be combined. 

Nobody had even thought of combining them. 

The idea is here that we want to be sustainable, and we want to develop and we wanted both. And so then the term was coined, “sustainable development” and suddenly that created a completely new way of looking at the world and it opened up a world of new possibilities, that is incredibly helpful and it’s triggered new science, it has triggered a new way of looking at what development actually is, it has created new definitions of sustainability.

And yet it’s a term that we all just take for granted today. 

Without knowing exactly what it means.

Exactly. You can’t define it but it’s inspirational. Another example I was thinking of earlier is actually an image that had this generative power to change and I’m sure, as soon as I mention it, everyone will be able to picture it. That powerful photo of a young girl in a village in Vietnam, running down the road after a Napalm attack on her village. I think we can probably all immediately conjure that up. That single image was so powerful that it changed the narrative of the Vietnam War by communicating the human impact of what was happening. And some say, it led to the end of the war, ultimately. So that’s an example of an image that has that generative power, a visual image. 

Exactly. We’re still experimenting with this in our own organisation. You, Kate, started working on that when you were working with our community. So you coined, or together we coined, it was actually coined in two places at the same time, I think, the term “Community of Grace”, that I think is a good example of a generative image as well, that has taken off. So can you explain a bit more about that?

Yes. Sure. Thank you for reminding me that it did emerge in two places at once, it was very strange, we both discovered we’d been working with this concept. It was not an intentional generative image. I was doing my masters studies at the time and only realised after it had been suggested, “Hey, this is a generative image” and it had already begun to grow legs and walk by then. So we were focusing on growing our sense of being a community rather than just a bunch of individual colleagues scattered around the world. And I think it was during a planning session, someone suggested that we needed another word to describe the kind of community we wanted to be and the concept of grace emerged. We want to be a community of grace, a community that is kind, caring, supportive, you know, despite the intensity and challenges of our work that we face together. And really it just took off. We did little more than just launch the term, provided a few materials, discussion things around it, and it just took off, people ran with it. They did their own things, they made it mean something for their team, their unit. We actually did very little and yet, I think, I don’t know, would you go as far to say it has changed our staff community? 

I think it has. I like this example, it shows again that generative images can come in different kinds. So the sustainable development one is one that has a built-in polarity. This one doesn’t necessarily.

Well, unless you think of communities as being not always the easiest place to find unity and grace. But yes, it’s less obvious than sustainable development. 

I think one way of arriving at a good generative image is thinking through some of the polarities that you’re wrestling with and looking at what are the things we want to hold in tension, but intentionally embrace, and is there a way to bring those concepts together in a novel way. I think some of that did happen with the community idea, it was individualism versus togetherness. It was the idea of grace but still doing the right thing. And so there’s those things, some of the ideas behind it, which makes it so powerful. But again, you can’t predict exactly what will work out, what won’t. But to use generative images as a leverage for change, I think, is a hugely helpful tool for any leader.

It’s about creating a rallying point for people. It’s recognizing that we have motivations and giving people a sense of purpose. I think often our organisational visions are so big and lofty and out there that they don’t really speak to us in quite the same way as maybe a purpose like that. We want to be a community of grace, or sustainable development, or another one from a book we both read recently was this building supplies company that talked about “stress-free customer service”. They were having a lot of problems with getting the right things to the right place and the right people at the right time and they came up with this generative image of stress-free customer service. And that was a purpose that sort of everyone could go “Yeah, we want to do this”, it gave them a sort of rallying point together.

I think that’s a key part of it. It’s a way to capture a shared passion, that people can say “Yes, that’s what we want. We don’t know how yet, but that’s what we want”. 

Yes, and I think the fact that it has has to be a little bit unobtainable in a sense, but, not totally, because visions or impact statements are sometimes so far out there. You can kind of roll your eyes and say, well that’s really nice, and yes, that is what we’re looking for. But actually a purpose, like 

“stress free customer service” is more obtainable. 

And the idea behind this is that people can interpret this and start to make it their own and build on it and then it all steers everyone in the same direction because it’s something that is a shared exploration. 

So with the example, in our organisation, we put that term out there and people just did different things with it and used it in different ways, but we were all going in the same direction of trying to increase our sense of being a community that was caring and supportive.

Yes, and that’s where culture change emerges without being able to control it. That’s exactly what you’re hoping for in a sense. It brings us back to those three ideas coming together, disruption, narrative and generative images – all sort of working in the same direction and building on that together. 

So, a generative image can both change the narrative in an organisation and it can also act as a kind of disruptor to challenge us to reconsider our socially constructed understanding or narrative about who we are and what we do and how we do it. 

And vice versa, it can sense of the disruption that people are really seeing and it then rallies around a new way of coping with the disruption that has been just something to stress over into something that actually people can embrace and run with.

Yes. I really like that, hadn’t thought of that before. Yes, actually, the right generative image can give you a way to cope with a disruption and the uncertainty. Going back to our VUCA world – volatile uncertain, complex and ambiguous world. Yes, those generative images can give us something to focus on. 

And having tied those three things together, I think we’re at the end of our time. 

I hope this inspires people to experiment, to work with change and realising that nurturing change is an art not a science. It’s an ongoing conversation. And again, we’d love to hear if any of this resonates with you. We’d love to hear your stories. Do you have any examples of how disruption, narrative change, generative images, all three together maybe, have contributed to change in your lives, in your work. Feel free to drop a line to us personally or a comment on the website at leadershipinconversation.net. 

Yes. We are preparing for an event in two weeks, where we will be experimenting with a very conversational process. So this means we will be off air for the rest of this month, but hopefully we can report back from that event afterwards and share what we did and how it went. And we’re also lining up a couple of interviews with others. So do check back for more episodes in May. 

Okay. I’m looking forward to sharing the stories of how disruption and conversation happened there. So that’s it for now. Thank you for listening. 

Episode 2

podcast with shownotes
Leading in Conversations
Leading in Conversations
Leading in Conversation – Episode 2
Loading
/

Shownotes

Links

Transcript


It’s good to be together again to talk together about conversational leadership. 

Yes. Definitely. I’ve been looking forward to this. 

So have I. In today’s episode we’re going to dig into the fundamentals of conversational leadership. What does it look like in practice? How does it actually work? In the first episode, we gave an overview of the six key principles of conversational leadership, and for those who haven’t heard that they may want to go and listen to that first podcast. But today we’re looking at what it is, how it actually works. And Kate, maybe you can start this off by saying something about that. Why is conversational leadership actually important? 

Well, I think we started to look at this last episode. For me, conversation has the power to generate new ideas, to help people come to new insights themselves, to help all of us come to new insights ourselves. I think that often emerges in conversation, more than we recognize or realise, and that leads us to make commitments, to change what we do in reality and then that leads to change in our lives. Both small changes and large changes, in our personal lives, in our organisational lives, etc. 

So it actually creates a chain of events, doesn’t it? Conversation starts with that generation of ideas, to new insights, to new commitments, to actual change. That’s quite cool, actually. 

Yes, and I think it happens so unconsciously, most of the time that we don’t realise we’re doing it. I bring an idea to you or just just mention something in a conversation. That changes somehow how you think. You bring something from your experience to add to that. The idea grows. It bounces back and forwards. You may mention it to someone else over coffee in the office. And then in it, things grow through those acts of relating to each other. 

Yes, and that can be both in the small things and the big things. And it’s conversations at an individual level and organisation-wide that are the core of real change.

I was just looking at the blue wall behind you. Our listeners can’t see that but I’m remembering a comment I made about how white your office was, and that led to a chain of events where now, you have beautiful blue walls! You know, just just a throwaway comment brought that change about. That’s a really small change. 

Yes, and even the big changes happen the same way. One example of that is in a conversation I was in earlier. We talked about the difference between survival mindset and opportunity mindset. That triggered for me all sorts of recognition in the organisation and then saying, “I want to talk about that”, and that then triggered other people talking about that. 

Yes, you brought it to us and now it’s an expression that we have started using and that changes our thinking. 

It becomes a thing, people start acting it out. And it’s not something you can control, it just happens.

We’ll touch on that later when we talk about changing the narrative. Because I think that’s a good example, about changing the narrative from survival to opportunity. 

Yes, exactly. But it’s important to note that those changes don’t happen overnight. You can’t force that kind of change to happen. It’s got to come from the inside of us. We’ve got to embrace something ourselves. 

Yes, absolutely. So, I think we were going to talk a little bit about the different uses of conversational leadership today. We in our own organisation have used conversational leadership quite a lot in big change processes. Concrete examples would be, we held a staff consultation about a financial issue that touched people personally. We also held a conversational process to set a new vision and mission for the organisation. We had direction-setting conversations with a group of staff delegates at our International Conference. So we’ve used it in those big processes and I think we’re becoming more comfortable and confident about doing that now, but it can also apply in our daily life as leaders. And that’s I think where we’re both experimenting still. 

Yes, I’m glad you mentioned that. It’s not just the big things, it’s also in the small things. Just recently I’ve worked with our leadership team to change the way we meet, to be more emergent, to not have everything nailed down ahead of time as to how we’re going to go through the agenda, and to really have more of a flow of unpredictable conversations and to embrace that. It feels kind of risky, but to trust ourselves that it’s going to go somewhere.

Yes, I think that’s really improved the quality of our meetings recently. It’s opening them up a bit more.

Another example is that I just recently started conversations with groupings of staff throughout the organisation where I don’t come with an agenda ahead of time, but basically say, “I want to hear where you’re at. I want to get into your skin in a way. What does it feel like where you are?” And that triggers a new dynamic and ideas to follow up on and people saying “Yes!”, and there’s a real appreciation of that. I think that again, that creates a dynamic of trust and small changes that allow us to move forward in new ways. 

I’ll admit, this is hard to do. I’ve been wrestling with this a little bit recently. Our default as leaders is often to speak before we listen, and these ingrained habits are hard to change. And also there’s the expectation that as a leader you will lead, you will have ideas. I think we mentioned this last time. It also takes a lot more time to open up a decision to conversation and consultation. It means being willing to pay attention to feedback, and reconsider decisions. I had an example recently, with one of the teams that reports to me where the team leader and I had made a decision about a new publication we were going to do and she took it to the team and they were like, “Actually, we don’t think that’s a good idea. We don’t think that works”. I had to stop myself and go “Oh, bother. I really should have done this in a more conversational, consultative way with that team”, rather than just the two leaders at the top making a decision that we were going to produce this publication and do this. It would have been so much better to start out saying. “Well, you know, here’s the challenge. Here’s the situation. How are we going to approach this? What publication will work? What channels, etc?” So it’s a constant sort of reorientation of our own habits as leaders, I think. 

Yes. It’s good to know also when that is needed and when it’s not. It’s an art. It’s not a science. 

Yes. There’s no list of when to use conversational leadership and when to be more directive. There are certain situations where it’s just inappropriate: in a crisis where a decision needs to be made very quickly, you can’t say, “Well wait, we’re going to set up a conversational process, and invite all these people”. Sometimes you just have to make a decision. 

Yes, and sometimes it’s something that’s small enough that it really doesn’t have much impact beyond a small group of people. So you can just make that decision. Sometimes it’s a very short conversation that can be done in 30 minutes. Sometimes it’s a very prolonged process. And knowing that is something we all need to learn. 

So Nelis, what do you think it takes to use conversation leadership well in day-to-day management? How does that work for you, for example? 

There are two aspects of that – and I think we need to go into this more deeply in a separate podcast – but there is an element of things to do and there’s an element of attitudes. So the “things to do” is, you need to consciously empower others. So, to help people come up with their own solutions, rather than present the solution to people, and basically say, “Yay, or nay?”. Secondly, I think it requires that you build connections with all the different stakeholders. So as a leader your role is to bring all the key people together. That’s I think a key aspect that you bring in as a leader. And as a leader, you also need to ensure that there is a diversity of opinions. We’ve talked about that earlier ,on our earlier podcast. It’s ensuring diversity is key there. Again, conversational leadership is about action. You need to in the end make sure that solutions are actually implementable, that there is actual progress, there’s a sense of accountability about that too, it’s taking it into action, which is again, a role of leadership. I want to underline those two things: the leader continues to have a key role, you’re not just a bystander, and the leader has a key role in ensuring action. 

Yes. Absolutely. You mentioned, it’s about attitudes. Can you elaborate on that a little bit? What should be the attitudes of the leader? 

Yes, I think a key attitude of the leader is openness. So that means that you allow this process of thinking out loud together. I find myself constantly saying that, I am just thinking out loud here. Please give your ideas, feedback, etc.

Secondly, I think it requires transparency, honesty and open-handedness and that’s linked to what I said earlier, and that requires an attitude of withholding judgement. You talked about that earlier, that you don’t come even subconsciously with the attitude that you have all the answers. That you truly think that the answers of others may be or actually very likely are superior. That’s hard.

Yes, it’s hard. Leaders tend to have a certain personality type and are often quite confident about the solutions they’ve come up with, so it takes humility. It takes stepping back and saying, you know what, these people probably have better answers or solutions than I do. 

Because as a leader you think you’re the expert but many many times, you’re actually not. 

All of this is attitudes and approaches and that’s all great but it may be helpful to explore a little bit what the actual steps are, what are the things you need to do concretely in a process? So let’s explore that. And I think the first step in the process is framing the issue. Can you say a little bit about that.

Yes, definitely. You can all gather for a conversation, but you need to know what you are talking about. This can be a problem, a question we want to solve, or an exploration of an issue before the problem is even identified, is even clear. The leader can frame the issue or you can do that as a group, I guess. It’s important that there’s clarity about what needs addressing. But at the same time that may shift as part of the conversation, actually, the really important problem at the root of something may not be the thing you’ve identified but it may emerge, the deeper issue, may emerge as you’re talking, so you need to be ready to keep an eye on that really and sense what the real issue is, and let the conversation flow in that direction if it needs to.

Always with this sense of “What are we trying to address?” There is always this framing, but realising that that frame may actually shift throughout the conversation. And that you’re framing that together, but constantly keep in mind that it’s not just a free-for-all about anything. 

Because you want the conversation to be productive and it needs to be framed well, in order to be productive. Otherwise, you’re going to range all over the place and touch on lots of interesting things, but not actually get anywhere. 

Yes, another word to use maybe is to have clear intent.

So the next stage I think is then… well, you’ve got to have invited people to join the conversation, probably before you frame the issue for them, but you probably want to frame the issue so that you can invite people to join you. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? 

For me that’s a key second part of a process: having the right people in the room or in the conversation. The room may be a lot of rooms over a lot of time, and that may actually take time. Who the right people are may actually be a process of discovery. I think it is important to have a feel for who are some of the key people I know about. And then have these people point to others, that they’re saying, “I think these people would be good at being part of this conversation”. And I think there’s some good examples of that. 

Yes, we both read this book by Patricia Shaw, Changing conversations in organisations. I love her case study at this company in Italy – I’m not sure if it’s a fictitious or not – Ferrovia – the process of adding people to the conversation. I don’t know if the phrase “the coalition of the willing” came from from her or someone else, but it’s that sometimes chaotic process of just pulling people in and someone saying, “Oh, wait, we need to go invite that guy”—and they all had great Italian names—”in that department over there”. Obviously, that’s easier when you all work on one site than if you’re remote, like us, but still you can say, “Well, let’s schedule another meeting and pull that person in”. It’s almost spontaneous, but engaging the energy and passion of those involved or those they know, rather than sitting down with your list as a leader and sort of writing up who the logical people are to be involved in this whether they’re interested or not. And I love that expression, “the coalition of the willing” because sometimes the most obvious people, the most obvious stakeholders, are not actually willing or interested, but there might be somebody completely out there you hadn’t thought of who’s actually got so much to bring. I always talk about getting beyond “the usual suspects”. Again as we’ve said many times, the novelty comes, the innovation comes, when you invite diversity into the process.

Yes, it’s actually an invitation to the people. It also shows respect to people who have ideas, that even if they don’t have a formal position, they are allowed to be part of that process. They would be invited in. I think that can be very powerful.

We need to get better at that, better at looking beyond our immediate circle of connections, beyond the usual suspects, and finding out who those people are.

Yes, because we only know who we know. You and I know only  a limited set of people and that’s true for any leader.

For these people to function well, it may be good to be aware that people need to feel safe. So you need to create safe spaces or “containers”. So can you say a little bit more about that? 

Two people who have written a lot about this are Jacob Storch and Chris Corrigan. I have a little quote from Chris Corrigan, defining containers as “intangible yet real spaces in which the potential and possibility of a group can unfold”. Containers can be, you know, a one-off event or a series of events or a series of conversations. I think we should probably give this another whole episode at some point. Focusing on creating a safe space or a container can involve anything from the physical environment of where you’re meeting, to the code of conduct for participation, the tools you use and other intangible aspects that ensure the psychological safety of the group and the openness to share and explore new ideas, to make it a really generative space. It’s really important that people feel safe. Safe from the repercussions of sharing honestly. Especially if you’re in a leadership role, the dynamic, the power dynamic… you have to be really careful that you make people feel safe, that what they share is not going to be repeated somewhere else, or it’s going to come back to haunt them.

Yes, I think that’s really important. Because people hold back if they think they’re going to be hurt by it. That sense of holding back will kill the conversation and I think that is often the case actually, people are like, “Well can I safely contribute this or not?”. That’s really important.

I think we’ve both experienced that in cross-cultural situations as well with our multicultural teams, that very often the loudest voices in the rooms are those of the Westerners. Others are holding back and we really need the voices of everyone, not just our Western expat colleagues, but our Majority World staff, especially as we are often working in their cultures, in their contexts, in their languages. 

One example, I was just thinking earlier about this, when I was first learning about participatory methods, I was using the Consensus Workshop method of the The Canadian Institute for Cultural Affairs, the ICA. They had this thing they call “Workshop Assumptions”. We had written the assumptions up on a big poster at the front of the room and it really struck me. We kept drawing people’s attention back to the workshop assumptions. Things like “Everyone has wisdom”. “Everyone’s wisdom is needed”. Because often in group conversations, you have those dominant people, who consume the sound space, and as a facilitator, or as a leader facilitating, you need to make sure that those assumptions are respected, that we need to hear from everyone. 

You’re talking about facilitation and that actually brings us nicely to the next point. It’s a great segue into structure and tools for hosting a conversation. We’ll explore a little bit the difference between facilitating and hosting. I think it’s good for you to maybe say a little bit about participatory methods that are often used in this field. 

I must say, at the outset, I am not an expert in this at all. We’ll have to bring some of our participatory methods colleagues in at some point. But I’m a big fan of participatory methods and I’m very much still learning. I think there are so many great tools out there: participatory methods, facilitation tools. Some of the ones we’ve used are: World Cafe, Appreciative Inquiry, Outcome Mapping, Consensus Workshop, Focused Conversations, Polarity Management. Maybe some of those ring bells with our listeners, but there are so many more. But one lesson that we’ve learned is that, while the methods and tools are excellent, we need to keep an eye on the overall flow of conversations. Sometimes the tools and methods can get in the way and take centre stage and that becomes unhelpful. I’m thinking of sessions where I’ve seen groups figuring out how to use the tool and that’s really eclipsed or taken the space of the conversation. So we’ve got to be careful, not to over-structure, and not to sort of focus on the tool and the perfect implementation of the method to the extent that the process becomes transactional, rather than transformational. I’m still trying to figure that one out, to be honest.

Yes, we’re still figuring that out. And that comes back to that comment I made earlier about hosting and facilitating because most of those tools assume a facilitator and as a leader or even as an outside consultant you are then a facilitator and everything kind of flows back to that facilitator. It’s the facilitator who draws the conclusions, it’s the facilitator who people talk to, and so they become the core focus, whereas a normal of free-flowing conversation shifts all the time around, people don’t talk to one person, but they talk to each other. It’s quite dynamic. That’s when I think you’re hosting, when the dynamic flow, the ebb and flow of conversation happens naturally. I love that concept of hosting. But as you said, we’re still figuring out what that looks like and how to do that in practice.

But it’s hard to host as a participant as well, isn’t it? I’ve observed you doing this in our leadership team meetings where you’re hosting, but you’re also wanting to contribute as yourself. Any reflections on that experience?

Yes, actually it’s interesting because I think that’s the power of it. Because if you’re facilitating, you can’t. But if you’re hosting you are actually a participant yourself as well. I mean, think of the host of a dinner party. The host participates, the host makes sure that the conversation keeps flowing, but at the same time participates and engages and has his or her own opinions, asks questions, brings people in who are quiet. I think that idea is actually quite powerful because as a leader you’re not just a facilitator. You have to participate because you’ve got a lot to contribute, others have a lot to contribute, but you do too. So, I find that a very powerful concept. And maybe that takes us, then actually quite naturally, to the next element of our process thoughts: you need to make space for the spontaneous. You already quoted Patricia Shaw. Anything more you want to say about that?

This is such a challenge, especially for someone who’s a bit of a planner like me. A bit of a “J” on the Myers-Briggs inventory. Yes, spontaneity, going with the flow. We referred to this earlier when we were talking about framing as well – watching for the real issue that emerges, but being ready to flex and change your plans at the last minute, and even mid-session is, I think, hard for us as leaders, but essential as hosts. This is where leading by feel and intuition comes in. I was thinking about an example from our International Conference in 2016 where I was on the facilitation team. While we were planning, a couple of months before, I had this sense that one session, I think it was the Saturday morning, it was a real pivotal moment. I think it was actually exactly halfway through the event. I just had this sense that that session would be pivotal and that we should hold our plans lightly. And that was really sort of scary paying attention to my intuition there. But sure enough that session came round and got completely diverted into a topic that had arisen during the event that one of the participants had brought to the facilitation team and said, “I think we need to actually pay attention to what’s arisen here and talk about some of the things people shared”. I was standing at the back with my notes for the day, you know, almost throwing away a page at a time as the minutes ticked on through the session. But I was okay because I had had that sense before that this was going to happen. For me, that was probably a bit of a God moment being sort of given that nudge beforehand. So I was ready to abandon my session plans, and flex. Actually I think we had 15 minutes left at the end to try and fit everything from the session and we didn’t, we reworked it, but that change was exactly what we needed at the time in that overall process. So I think that making space for the spontaneous is really important. And also as part of that, paying attention to the small things that happen, the throwaway comments with people outside of these containers, outside of these formal processes, picking up on things. I remember we did a conversational process about one of our action plans. We got our operational units to give feedback. In the margin of one of the group’s notes, they’d done some doodles for a way to express the action plan goals. It was such a great sort of global thing. I think we had a very linear representation at the time—an arrow—I think you might have actually created it. They had this little doodle and we gave that to our designer who then came up with that and it became a sort of logo. Asia had it printed on mugs, somebody else had a key ring or something, and it was just really fun to see. It’s paying attention to those small things, as well as the big things, and, and just being spontaneous and adding those in.

Yes, I love that. That requires something else we’ve talked about in the process, is that you need to stay long enough in the groan zone.

What’s “the groan zone”, Nelis?

Sam Kaner has done some work on that: The Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making talks about that. But the groan zone is this area, the time in the process, where you have no idea how it’s going to ever come to a good conclusion. I’ve often seen that. You’ve got this sense of “This plane is not going to land!”

Yes, it’s horrible. What are we doing? Where are we going to end up on this? 

Exactly. That sense of staying there. Not trying to quickly move out of it and get to the comfortable solution. Staying in that exploratory phase where things seem to go in every direction. To embrace that chaos and then consciously stay at it. I think that’s quite important. It feels very messy. It feels disorganised. It feels frustrating. It’s not for nothing called the groan zone. That is where in a way, the creativity happens. That’s where people are forced outside of their comfort zone and to explore new ways of looking at things. 

Yes. The way that Kaner brings it up in his book, he’s talking about a process where you have a time of gathering as much input as you can, a sort of divergent phase. And it’s the turning point before you head into the convergent phase, where you’re trying to sort of settle and come to conclusions and action items, etc. If you try to jump too quickly into that convergence, you’ll miss that essential kind of magic that happens in the groan zone where suddenly everything sort of settles out and people come to a realisation and then agreements start to form and directions flow. I think we’ve all been there. I loved it when I came across this, in this book, The Facilitators Guide to Participatory Decision-making, he calls it the groan zone. I was like, “Yes! That perfectly describes it”. I often tell people beforehand now. “There’s going to be this thing called the groan zone and you’ll know when we get there because it’s horrible, and you just think, “Why are we doing this? Can we have a coffee break now? Can we leave? Can we finish?””. 

And there’s a comfort in knowing that isn’t there? That, yes, this is normal.

We need to grow our tolerance for uncertainty, and ambiguity and chaos, I think, and our patience and trust in each other and trust in the process.

But you do need to come to conclusions, which is then the last part we wanted to talk about, the last part of the process we want to explore, is you need to come to conclusions. That actually means that all of the conversations need to then be translated into commitments to do something, to act. I think it’s really important to note here that those conclusions are not about the prescriptions for everyone else, what they need to do. It is actually what you commit to yourself. What am I going to do? What do I commit to? And that’s quite different. But I think that’s important. The conclusions are about my commitment to the change.

Yes, Dialogic Organisation Development – Bushe and Marshak – they talk about probes as one of the as the outcome, where you go from a dialogic process. This is giving the people involved in the process the permission, the space, to then launch probes. That means to try things out, to put their innovations into practice. You create space for them to do that in their job. And you give them budget, you give them the permissions necessary for them to try things out and attempt to work out the conclusions reached in the conversation. That’s again another area we need to look into experimenting with. Because what you don’t want is a great conversation to happen and then everything to get handed back to the leaders, who we all know are often the bottleneck in processes, in change. As leaders we need to start opening up space for others to experiment and try things out and also to fail because we can learn from our failures as much from, or more probably, than from our successes. 

I think that’s great, because otherwise you abandon the conversational leadership approach immediately after the first conversation. It’s an ongoing thing, it’s a repeated thing, and even that sense of conclusion is always a temporary conclusion, it’s a conclusion for now and then the cycle restarts. It gets repeated in different places throughout the organisation.

This has been great, Kate, I really enjoyed this. I really hope it inspires people to do this experimentation, to be part of such a cycle, to create space, to be in the groan zone, to innovate, to start those probes, this invitation to experimentation. It’s good to say again that this is something that’s an art, it’s not a science. It’s something that needs to be learned through practice. I’m really looking forward to people experimenting with this and sharing back with us what they are learning, where they have struggled, where they have seen it work, what’s been exciting. So bring your comments!

On that point, leadinginconversation.net. Please add your comments and continue the conversation with us. 

Yes, and we’ll see what emerges. 

Yes. Okay, that’s all for today. Thank you for listening! 

Episode 1

podcast with shownotes
Leading in Conversations
Leading in Conversations
Leading in Conversation – Episode 1
Loading
/

Shownotes

Links

Complex Responsive Processes of Relating (CRPR) – Ralph Stacey
Dialogic Organisation Development – Gervase Bushe and Robert Marshak

Transcript

Welcome to our podcast, Leading in Conversation. Hi Nelis, this feels a little bit awkward. How do you start a podcast? 

Especially if it’s the first one? So yeah, I’m glad we’re doing this. This is exciting and scary and I am really looking forward to connecting with people and uh even if it’s just talking to you. 

Yes. So I guess we should start out by introducing ourselves and the concept of conversational leadership and then maybe later episodes we can dig into that in more detail later. 

Let’s do that then. So, why don’t you kick us off? 

Introductions

Kate

Okay, so I’m Kate, and I’m from the UK. Although I spent most of my early adulthood in Papua New Guinea. Alongside raising children, I was involved in strategic planning, facilitation, things like that. And I got to see leadership and change processes from the inside, from the back room perspective. And to be honest I became disillusioned with traditional models of leadership, uh, heroic leadership, uh, control and command style leadership, and also with organisational change management. And also as a parent raising children I became curious about how change happens, both on a personal level and organizationally. 

In 2014 I began Masters studies and I encountered the work of Ralph Stacey and his theory of complex responsive processes of relating – CRPR. That led on to discovering Dialogic Organisation Development, developed by Gervase Bushe and Bob Marshak, which really started making a lot of sense to me. I really loved what they were describing, as a totally new way of looking at organisations, at change, through the use of conversations and as a, as a writer as a communications person I’ve always got excited at the power of words and language to connect people and to bring change really, so all of this started ringing bells and um inspiring me. And then midway through my Masters studies in 2016 we relocated to the UK and at that point our new Executive Director – who you were already working with, Nelis – asked me to join his team, to build an internal communications function in our organisation,  pretty much making it up from scratch really. His leadership style was very conversational and we found that our interest in conversational leadership connected there and he gave me an incredible amount of freedom, permission to experiment in our organisation with global staff conversations, using conversational processes and it just seemed to work. If you remember Nelis you were one of my first guinea pigs,  which you probably weren’t aware of at the time, but it’s been fun exploring over the last uh – how many years is it now – 6-7 years. So, how about you? Why don’t you introduce yourself? 

Nelis

I’m from the Netherlands and fairly early on in my career I moved to Africa to work with our organisation there. Was there actually for 20 years in a variety of uh leadership roles. One of my first experiences with significant global leadership processes was in 2010. When I was asked to be part of a global task force to look at significant change, overhaul of organisational structures in our organisation. That change was basically a significant failure. Like many change processes actually, 

75% of change processes fail, which is, is fairly disappointing. 

And scary to be aware of, so that’s why we need to look at different models. Anyway, this was one of those and it’s become a major stumbling block in the organisation for further change, actually, and we’re still overcoming that. But being part of that process as that task force, I realised that while we had good ideas, I think, we did not have a process to implement it. We were focusing on the ideas from a top-down level and the organisation just couldn’t embrace it, wasn’t part of it, didn’t feel co-ownership with it, and as a result started to resist it. And that is what really got me interested in looking at, are there different ways of doing this? 

And it’s really interesting because I think now, we are, as you said, the ideas were good, and we’re still working our way through some of the same issues now, but it was the process, as you said. And I remember being on the receiving end in Papua New Guinea and I think we had like a 40 page document that just suddenly appeared announcing all these changes and it was kind of like “What?!”, and this was the first we’d heard of it. So as you say, process is really important, and involving staff in change, even in the co-creation of change, rather than producing it from above is really critical.

Anyway, in 2016 I was asked to join our incoming Executive Director as part of his leadership team and was quite inspired by his approach where he took basically a look back at the organisational history and uh explored our journey up to that point and then um took that for conversation into the whole organisation, saying, do we recognize this? What does this tell us right now? Where are we? Where should we go at this crossroads in our organisational history? And that became quite powerful. And again was an inspiration to me as I started exploring the idea of a different kind of process. And soon after that I started working with Kate. I actually was one of her, not just guinea pigs, but also early adopters, reviewing with her, her MA work, looking at what can I learn from that? But also giving input. And so we started that conversation both at a theoretical level and at a very practical level in our organisation of what does this concretely look like? We started to experiment basically in the organisation ourselves as to what works and what doesn’t. 

Why are we starting this podcast?

And one of the reasons that we started this podcast is because other people have heard about those experiments in SIL with conversational leadership, and have been interested and said, “Can we talk to you about this? Can we learn more about what you’re doing?” And we’ve found over the last year that we are meeting up with quite a lot of people from other organisations, similar nonprofit organisations particularly and having some great conversations, exploring that with people. But we thought, well, maybe we should start putting some of this down  in some form, and actually a podcast seemed more appropriate to conversations than writing a book or something like that. So, yeah, Nelis, anything to say about this podcast, why we’re doing it? 

I think we’re still going to write that book at some point, but at this point a podcast is, I think as you said, the best way forward and we can do that fairly quickly. So, we’re doing this because we feel that we want to share experiences, the journey, with others, from an inside perspective. So one of the things that…, I mean, almost all of the books are basically written for people doing organisational development who come in as consultants from the outside. And the experience is always that of the outsider. Now, that’s all great. But what do you do as a leader, when you are responsible in the end for that change? And people look at you to make decisions, not start conversations. What does that look like? How do you change the expectations? How do you live with the expectations? How do you give leadership and still find a different way to do that, a conversational way to do that. So that’s what we want to explore with each other and with maybe other experts and interview people and find ways to make this very practical.

And you must check out our blog for links to some of our favourite writers and practitioners on the topic of conversational leadership because there’s some great stuff out there. Dialogic organisational development as well as conversational leadership. People like David Gurteen, and the Bushe and Marshak Institute are some of my favourites. We probably should start out with a disclaimer. We’re not experts, we’re practitioners, we don’t have it all figured out and we’re still learning and we want to learn in conversation with others and continue the journey with others, but we’ll be pointing you to some of the experts and writers along the way. 

Who, by the way, are also on a journey. The whole idea is that this is a new field where everybody is still learning. And actually the world is changing so fast that we can’t just settle and say now we’ve got it. And so, this ongoing exploration is going to be important. 

What is conversational leadership?

So that is a great segue, Nelis, into our main topic for the day, really, which iswhat is conversational leadership? And we thought we’d give a brief introduction today and then follow up in later episodes. So what is conversational leadership, Nelis?

Well let me first say something about what it is not. What I often see happen is people say, oh that’s great, that’s a wonderful tool to use. And yes it is, but when we’re talking about conversational leadership we’re thinking about it as much more than just a tool. It is a way of looking at all of leadership and actually what an organisation is. And that is my second point, it’s a totally new way of looking at what an organisation actually is, and I think that’s important too, to understand.

And I’d add to that, it’s a new way of relating to staff. It’s about respecting and involving staff in a whole new way, in decision-making and change, for me I think that’s really critical. And you mentioned earlier a little bit that this is still an emerging field, very much so. I think it started developing in the early 2000’s, sort of in contrast to the historic approach to leadership and change which was very much heroic, top-down, managerial, management-led and it’s probably developed as a response to the sort of sea change in culture too. People are more connected than ever before through the internet. Life has become more complex and change is more constant. If you read some of the early change management tomes, textbooks, classic texts, such as Lewin, they refer to change as a sort of one-off event, where you need to unfreeze, make the change happen and then freeze again and then life can go on as…  and now that just seems so strange because change is constant. You’re changing your change as you go, even, I think everyone would probably resonate with that today, especially in our current pandemic context. 

Yes, I think of Kotter who basically had the change figured out and then you create five steps to change (Eight!) and then you’re done and so we’re talking about something quite different. It is change that is constant. It is change that is done together where the leader has a very different role, a convener, a shepherd, rather than the one who knows everything. 

Key Principles of conversational leadership

Why don’t we run through some of the key principles of conversational leadership right now, that we will be digging into in later episodes? Nelis, why don’t you kick us off with this new way of looking at organisations? 

1. An organisation is a web of ongoing conversations

One of the first things we’ve already mentioned shortly is that an organisation is a web of ongoing conversations. So that defines organisations quite differently. That’s the first principle. An organisation is a web of ongoing conversations. That means that it’s not a neat set of boxes on an org chart, which is what we often think of, as we define an organisation. It’s actually not the legal incorporation that defines the organisation because organisations are in reality, much more fluid than that. It is the identity people give to this somewhat abstract concept together. And it is in conversations – where people share information, where they identify together, what they are about, where they learn to diagnose problems, where they look together at making commitments – that an organisation is actually defined. Together we give it meaning and that has profound implications, of course, so when you think of what that means, that if an organisation truly is that web of conversations, then leadership is about engaging with and participating in all of those interactions that happen naturally, anyway. And conversational leadership is about doing that, engaging every staff member in a way to do that shaping of the organisation together, rather than assume that it’s sort of done outside of everybody. 

2. Everyone in the organisation has wisdom that is needed

A second key principle is that everyone in the organisation has wisdom, and their wisdom is needed. And that’s very much in contrast to that sort of traditional lone omniscient leader. We want to engage everybody in change and access their insights, their experience. Now, sure, the position and the connections that leaders have does give them access to privileged information and broader perspectives, but they don’t have access to all the information and understanding needed and they’re often out of touch with the experience of staff on the ground. I think we as leaders need to be really aware of that. We are very much out of touch with the experience of staff on the ground. They’re responsible for day-to-day operations. They have deep insights into what really happens, as well as the ability to influence people and projects and bring change much, much more quickly. And we need to bring those two perspectives together. I think that’s really valuable, really important, the sort of big picture perspective, but then the on-the-ground perspective, we need to get those insights and that experience and the wisdom that flows from it. The philosophy behind conversational leadership, which we will look into later, is that meaning is socially constructed, we build it together and everyone has wisdom to contribute to that.

That goes back to our earlier point about the organisation being defined by all of us together. So it’s a social construct. You cannot work as if it is defined top down. And I think that is a key part of the whole idea behind conversational leadership. And when I talk about it with people, people recognize that, they are immediately aware, they are like “Yeah, when we did that change process or when these leaders said that, they had no idea of what it’s really like”. And you get those kinds of responses all the time. And so I think it touches a reality many of us recognize.

Yes, definitely. So is there even a place for a leader these days? 

3. Leaders have an important but different role to play

Absolutely. That is actually the third principle that we want to explore. That leaders have a very important role to play but it’s quite different.So the leader doesn’t stand outside the organisation, is not one who dictates action but is one that is engaged in that web of conversations and is able to help shape that conversation without being able to control it, and that is key. So what does shaping versus controlling mean? So one aspect of that is that the right questions are asked so that conversations are actually, have a direction that they’re so focused, that they’re productive and it doesn’t become just chatter, which can easily happen if you are not careful.

Definitely. I think that’s one of the things that people say about conversational leadership. I think we’re going to get on to that later. It’s just, how is this different from what we do anyway? We talk, how is this different? But actually the framing is really important. 

Yes, so it’s very purposeful and that’s where leadership, without giving all the answers, asks the right questions and that, of course, that also means that you’ve got to involve the right people. So leaders need to be the ones to ensure that all of the different key perspectives are brought into the conversation. Because if you don’t, you get a very one-sided view of the situation and actually half of the group still feels excluded and they will create their own social reality, which is then in opposition to leadership, which is not helpful at all. And again, we see that happen all the time. 

One of the reasons we need diversity is that’s where novelty and new ideas come from. If you’re stuck with the same group of people talking about something all the time, and there’s no new input, new insights, you’re pretty much going to get stuck going around in circles. So bringing in new people, bringing in diverse perspectives and experiences is actually what you need to create that novelty that will lead to new solutions, new answers.

But before we go there: conversations need some kind of closure in the sense that you want to come to conclusions that lead to action, that form the basis for further conversation. So there’s a sense of clarifying what has come out of the conversation and together determine what the next steps will be. And again that is a key leadership role. So back to diversity.

4. Diversity is needed

As I said, you know, a diversity of experience and wisdom is needed to find solutions and direction. And if you’ve got the same group of leaders talking about the same problem over and over and over, you’re not really going to get anything new. If you have similar backgrounds, similar life experiences, exposure to the same set of influences and information, you’re going to find that you’re limited in ideas and options. So it’s always great to gather a diverse group of people together if you want to imagine and invent different futures. And I think something we’ll get into later is the connection to complexity science and what that has revealed about how novelty emerges when diversity is introduced to an existing pattern, and how the same result can be seen in groups of people working on a task. 

I’ve become very fascinated by the whole complexity science and its discoveries. It’s probably one of the most exciting fields of science right now and um that is so meaningful to leadership because we live in what we call a VUCA world. (Volatile, unpredictable, complex and ambiguous.) This VUCA world, this complex, volatile world requires a different kind of leadership. And that is why this starts to resonate with so many. 

Yes. I think that the pandemic has shown that. Leading with uncertainty, or leading into the unknown, that’s probably a whole topic for another whole episode. And that’s huge right now. How do you, how do we, lead into the next year when we don’t know what’s going to happen?

Exactly. It’s not knowing it is the reality that everything is related to everything. That when you think you have a sense of control, you’re completely kidding yourself because it doesn’t work that way. It’s that reality that people come to grips with and then say, okay, but you can’t give up on leadership in that situation. So what does leadership look like? And that’s what we’re talking about. 

There are so many fascinating threads with this topic, with this whole area. We could go off down many rabbit trails, but let’s get back to our key principles. 

5. Talk IS action

So talk is action. One of the most fundamental misunderstandings about conversational leadership is that it is just talking and does not result in action, as, as we mentioned earlier. But conversational leadership views conversation as action. It is in that back and forth, that reciprocal exchange of information, and the development of ideas that new thoughts and insights emerge, and are developed or co-created. And, in fact, we played a little bit with using the term co-creation rather than conversation, conversational leadership, co-creational leadership, at one point because conversation just sounded a bit too much like chat, a bit too like normal even. But the thing I love about a conversational process is that it enables us to hear the perspective of others to wrestle with information and implications and to come to those insights, those original thoughts that are necessary for real change to occur. You know, nobody really changes because they are given a 40 page document telling them how they should change. I’ve not seen that happen yet. I think we need to wrestle with the problem ourselves and come to those insights in order to change our behaviours, whether that’s on a personal level or in an organisational context as well. And those changes to go deep down in our own attitudes. Even deeper. We’ve obviously been talking a lot in our organisation about mental models currently and what are the mental models that drive our attitudes and behaviours, and then are reflected in the structures and processes of the organisation. So talk is definitely action. 

Yes, definitely. And it is not fluffy in that sense at all. It really is about core changes that actually significantly change the organisation and lead to results. And so that is really important to understand, that it can be quite hard core and that it can be quite focused but it’s often into the unknown because nobody knows beforehand what the right solution is and even if you did it may not be the right solution anymore a year from now. And that is what we need to embrace and why it is about action and conversation together. 

Keeping on talking, keeping on assessing where we’re at.

I think we’re getting towards the point where we might need to wrap up, Nelis. Is there anything else you want to say at this point about key principles? 

6. Conversational leadership opens up space beyond the rational

Yes. There’s something that is a little bit hard to put into a principle as such, but I think conversational leadership opens up a space for us to look at ourselves as more than just rational. So, we already talked about mental models. When we engage people, we engage them as people with all of their backgrounds, with all of their realities, as holistic beings. And that also opens up space for a spiritual aspect. We are Christians and for us then that means that we create space for God to speak into the process. For somebody who’s not a Christian as such it may be defined differently, but we are spiritual beings and to create space for all of reality, I think is important. It gives us a space where we’re open to listen, to explore, to use our intuition, and to hear perspectives that go beyond just the rational aspect.

And to feel our way forward. I particularly love that about intuition, as you know, I’m very much into using intuition in leadership and that sort of sense of leading by feel. So, yes, I agree with you there. Conversational leadership does really does open that up beyond the rational.

And I would even call it, very concretely, it opens up a space for faith. And for me, that is faith that God can act in incredibly complex situations. For somebody else it may be faith that together we can overcome this. But there is a faith component in there, which I think is very important to be aware of. 

Closing

So, I think that’s probably enough for today. And as I’ve said repeatedly, we will be exploring all of this in more depth in future episodes and I’m really looking forward to that. We’ll be interviewing some practitioners for their perspective too. For now, you might want to hop over into our blog at leadershipinconversation.net. That’s all one word, leadershipinconversation. We’d love to hear from you. Tell us what you think. Tell us what you heard today that you want to hear more about, because we’ll use that feedback to shape our future episodes. leadershipinconversation.net  

And please do join us because it’s in conversation that it happens. 

Absolutely. Thank you for joining us.